Burning Fingers
by steamboats
Summary: Booth, down on one knee, proposed to the woman he loved. For the first time in her life, Brennan struggled with the realization that science had failed her. Reason had failed her. If only she was as cognizant of her feelings as the woman was. Hannah always knew and Brennan always fell short. He was out of reach now and she did it by burning her own fingers. (case-fic; slow burn)
1. Christmas Tree

**Disclaimer:** Please, they would've been together since the pilot if I owned it.

* * *

Booth had run a monologue through the deepest of his thoughts before slinging the blanket beyond him to pull himself out of bed. He looked at the woman beside him, a smile too wide he probably would not be distinguished as himself. It was so unlike him, how happy he was. Walking on the balls of his size ten feet to maneuver with as little noise as his two-hundred something pound self could force. He placed the measuring tape earlier farther than he had thought, taking five gigantic strides to reach the dresser where it was homed. It took him another five to reenter the bed and fiddle with the woman's right hand, reciting soft prayers in hopes she remains undeterred. He wrapped it around her ring finger and memorized the three digits printed where the end of the tape met the measure. An apprehensive thought made him pause, is the right ring finger the same as the left? He dumbs down the science but grew anxious because what if it wasn't? Before he could reach to her other side where her left hand laid still and inviting on the pillow, the phone rang. He did not know whose, and at the moment, did not care because he felt the cold ground hit his back. Booth had fallen off the california king, startled. He made an attempt to look like he was awoken, squinting his eyes and rasping his voice when he saw the blonde woman groan and reach for the ruckus on the night stand.

"It's like–" he looked at the digital box, "–three a.m."

The woman was too lethargic to acknowledge his complaint. She propped herself on an elbow and placed the phone on her ear. "What?"

Booth placed the tape under the bed like a bustling fourteen-year-old caught in defiance (the age description not far off from the truth as his lovely significant other would attest). He sat on the floor and crossed his arms on top of the bed, staring intently as the woman groaned into the phone.

"Jesus, Antonio…" She piqued into the microphone. "Okay, fine…Just next time, please wait until I'm actually awake…No, I really don't…Thanks for the update…Also, get some damn sleep," she stressed before hanging up.

"Who was that?" Booth was back on the bed pulling the blanket up his bare chest.

"You know that robbery piece we were working on?" Her arms found their way around him, instantaneously. His lips found her forehead likewise as he nodded in accordance to her question. "Yeah, well he was finally caught on camera about thirty minutes ago and it turns out he's a cop," her voice muffled on his skin, but clear enough to alert Booth.

"Wait," he suddenly perked. "The thief is a cop?"

She felt herself dozing off, her words getting lighter, but pushed out a last-minute explanation: "It's an undercover cop manning one of the gangs downtown. I guess the job got a little too exciting and he succumbed."

As a patriot and a cop, he grew disappointed.

"If I knew journalism was going to wake me up in the middle of the night I would've dropped the job so quickly…" She mumbled into him making him ease.

"I love you," he whispered. He did not think she heard but the slightest movement he felt on his skin, where her lips were, assured him that she had.

"I love you."

* * *

Her hand tightened the red fabric he had around his collar. Always the rule-bender he was, never conformed to the dress code. No one ever made him, anyway. The best agent they could ever and will ever have was him; solving cases, sometimes with great autonomy nowadays, that the allowance of colored ties—personally-catered to him only—was the greatest form of expressing their gratitude for his service. All the bureau ever asked of him was to do his job as best he could, they never really thought that he would reach for the moon in doing so. His loyalty tolled precedence over any mischief they already foresaw in hiring a twenty-something army vet.

"Be careful, okay?" She always said that before he walked out the door. Every day he went to work, every day she spoke the maxim.

Routinely, he responded with: "Always am." It was like saying "I love you", but in different words, claiming the endearment in a language understandable only to them.

The seven months he had spent away in the camouflage ensemble felt so familiar to his Ranger days, but so unlike in that, he had found someone. Three months after professing his love for another woman, he had found someone who returned it bearing cognizance to her own feelings. Hannah was not unsure or indifferent about her love for him. She was sure of it. She was one hundred percent in it, unlike Rebecca, unlike Cam, unlike _her_.

Booth always thought his partner was for him. He knew she loved him. No matter how unsquinty he was, he was not brainless. He understood signals even the most socially-obtuse presented, no matter how she felt she hid it. But the steps at the Hoover building and how she had responded told him more than she let on. She loved him, that is for sure, but she did not love him enough. There was only one man in her life who was capable of changing her. Tim Sullivan dragged her out of the lab, something Booth could never do. Not even for a weekend could he convince her to drop her work. For once in his life, Booth saw her more excited about being on a boat than looking at calcium composites. He once asked her to go on vacation, but to no avail found her at a dig site. She did not think of bones or anthropology with Sully. She did not spit out facts about cultural mating systems and family hierarchies. Not with Sully. She treated him like he was a gem from a separate world. If she believed in deities, her behavior with Sully was as close to adoration as the universe will ever see from her. It was not until the end of it all when Booth realized that work was still so important to her that she could never sail off to other islands to live another life with him. Still, no matter how much she enjoyed the fruitful works of anthropology, Sully was as close as anyone ever came in unraveling her.

Booth felt he was it. He felt that he could go further than Sully did. Throughout the six years they had worked together, he felt himself break through her military-grade walls, with their after-mission unscrupulous banters at the bar, and him seeing every inch of her personality with the effect every case had on her like dead tigers or babies found in a tree or fostered children. They were a family. The signals were there. He took a chance and that landed his conscience six-feet underground, never to gamble on her again. He thought he was better than Sully. With great confidence, he really did. Fate was not ludicrous to him, he had come to terms that they were too different and God made them that way. They were separately the heart and the brain and Booth finally realized that his god made that symbiosis to build a partnership like never before. They were to be compatible enough to work well-oiled, but different to preserve the chastity, as God would have made in a brother and a sister. Angela's psychic was wrong.

Not like he believed her anyway. Not in the slightest bit.

* * *

"Why are you prancing?" Cam was on the platform, fiddling with the cheek of a homicide victim when Booth made his way through the sliding doors of the Medico-Legal Lab.

"Prancing? No one's prancing," he denied.

"It was more skipping than prancing," Hodgins butted, walking around the table with a petri dish and his other hand—arm, actually—shoulder deep in a liquid of god-knows-what.

"I was not skip-"

"You were skipping," Hodgins deadpanned as his arm escaped the mire, clasping something he had found. He gleamed at the particulate like he does with everything else disgusting to the average person.

"Does no one else smell that?" Booth asked as he made his way up the steps to the platform. His nose crinkled abnormally as he neared the decomposing on the table. "It's like a dead rat swam in a pool of overcooked cabbages and was thrown into a box full of dead rats who also swam in overcooked cabbages."

The two scientists paused simultaneously and stared straight at him, their eyes squinting with inquisition and curiosity. They peered at him like he bore three heads. Not two. Three.

His hand waved as a signal for them to go on and abandon his supposition.

"That, G-man, is hydrogen sulfide," Jack perked up at the info. He fiddled with the microscope happily.

"Meaning?"

"Sewage," Cam said as she stuck her hand inside something on the victim's side. "A couple of underground hermits found him in the systems."

"Okay but sewage smells better than that," Booth looked at the tank Hodgins had his arm in not long ago. Yes, sewage definitely smells better.

"That's because this sewage was twenty miles away from a near fracking ground. That's hydrogen sulfide times two. There's no way the crude oil made its way into the sewer system, though, so something tells me he was doused in it before being tossed. Why? I don't know. There's no evidence that he was meant to be incinerated." Hodgins explained as his arm fiddled around with the tank once again.

"So far," Cam spoke. "No evidence of foul play."

"Okay but something tells me he didn't just drop himself in the sewage."

"Yeah this is definitely a homicide," Hodgins said.

Booth nodded and looked around. "Where's Bones?"

"She's in her office. I can't give her any bones yet until I go through a full autopsy work up," she continued. "Also, be careful. She's mad because your forensics guys got to the scene before her and tampered with it more than she'd like. _And_ , it's gonna be hours before I can give her her bones. Her morning isn't swell."

He chuckled at her apprehension and went to visit his partner. He leaned on the doorjamb to see how long she would notice his presence. There was a gigantic clear piece of glass standing next to her desk. On it were Post-It notes followed by larger pieces of paper. There were some pictures, though minimal. His first thought was that she had built a criminal profile or forensic map of some sort, but a title above them written with a marker in her handwriting said otherwise. _Burning Fingers._ It was an outline for a new book

"You have been standing there for five minutes," Dr. Temperance Brennan acknowledged him without peering away from her computer screen, clearly having felt his company the moment he stood in the doorway. He was not in her sight, but three different types of martial arts and self-defense training developed within her a third eye capable of feeling panoramic which he completely forgot about.

"Good mornin', Bones," he spoke charmingly.

She lifted her head and met his eyes, smiling. "Hey, Booth. Do you like the title?"

"It's very impressive."

"Yes, I went online and searched for idioms. Apparently, to burn one's finger means to suffer the consequences of his actions. It originated from an English proverb," she gleamed. He just laughed. Despite her lack of social consciousness, she works very hard to try to understand. These moments make him proud. "Anyway, did you get the file?" She asked regarding the case.

"I did," he opened the folder. "Gideon Caster, twenty-nine, petroleum engineer, went missing two weeks ago. I have Aubrey looking through his background and Angela's on his social media. All I need is you." He said the last part in a manner he did not mean, almost intimate, but she barely noticed, back to her typing a draft on the computer.

"For what?"

"I tracked down his fiancee. She was the one that reported him missing. Let's go," he chimed.

"Why can't you take Aubrey?" She asked absent-mindedly.

Booth slumped down on her couch, seeing her continue to type and focus with no change in demeanor. She had been like that ever since they both came home from their sabbaticals. She was a little more closed off than he remembered. Maybe his perspective had been more withdrawn because his attention was to Hannah, but he was aware enough to understand that he was treating her the same way he always had. He knew he remained charming and attentive and they bickered still, but not so much with the same charisma as they had before. They were partners, but she always asked him to take Aubrey to investigate, as if her interest had suddenly dwindled.

"Come on, Bones! It's been awhile with just us investigating," Booth enthused.

Still, on her computer, she responded, "I just have a lot on my dish, Booth. Not right now."

He let out a small laugh at her solecism. "It's plate, Bones."

"What's plate?"

"It's 'I've got a lot on my plate', not dish," he laughed. Her face remained a little confused and he dropped it. She was not entirely a lost cause, but she neared such. "Come on. If you don't get up I'm gonna drag you out in your chair."

"That would work except you would have a difficult time trying to push the small wheels through the asphalt," she countered.

"I'll just carry you then," he joked.

"I would strike you if you do any of the sort, Booth." Brennan looked up from the computer, completely serious.

He chuckled, knowing full well she would. "Bones, please. It's been a long time since we've actually gone out to the field together."

She sighed and agreed, seeing him engage in a smile of triumph she could only roll her eyes to. With a grab of her coat, they made their way out to his car. Booth felt his phone vibrate and answered it without looking at the caller id.

"Booth," they entered the car and he started the engine, phone still to his ear.

"Hey, babe," Hannah's voice lit up his face. Brennan saw his expression and she smiled. His face lit up like a Christmas candle (or was it Christmas light?). "I'm about to leave for work. Can we grab lunch later, like, say, one o'clock?"

He looked at the clock in his car, pulling out of the parking structure and onto the road. "Works for me." Brennan studied him intently. Booth only expressed a similar sort of disposition in the presence of Parker. He was most certainly very happy with Hannah, considering her as part of the strings of people capable of unconditional love. That is what Brennan learned from Sweets, anyhow. Apparently, the concept of unconditional love is present extensively among parent and child, especially among mother and child. It lined up well in anthropology, the child obviously favoring the source of food in terms of survival necessity. But then Sweets also said that such bond can be formed between two people who have a connection only capable of being severed by death. Temperance had been to her fair share of weddings to understand that he was referring to the "death do us part" dictum romanticized by the church in the form of marriage. Aristocratic wives who had lived amidst Ancient Hindu practice threw themselves in fire when their husbands died because their lives ended when their significant other did. Back then, death never really did them part but she does not see the ritual still being condoned today. Why do people still participate in the thousand-year-old commencement of wedlock (done solely to authenticate monogamy) when they do not partake in any sort of ritualistic separation thereafter? The genius of Brennan's brain always ran wild with understanding, but rarely with the antiquated ceremonies so sacrilegious to people of modern age.

"Make sure to open your dinner on the twenty-seventh okay?" Booth spoke on the phone, earning a sight of confusion from Brennan. "It's a secret. But just make sure not to make any plans, please." He smiled wide. "Okay, bye. I love you."

Brennan could not help but mirror his joy. The man was onto something, and as his best friend (a title she had accustomed herself with fittingly), she was to find out. "What's so special on the twenty-seventh?"

Booth smiled wide. It was a larger one. A smile that Brennan would not be able to recognize Booth can actually form. It was Christmas tree! That is what she meant. His face lit up like a Christmas tree.

Like a child opening a present, he answered with the giddiness, "I'm gonna propose."


	2. Biological Urges

**Disclaimer:** I don't own it. Trust me, I checked.

* * *

Booth's FBI-issued SUV was parked parallel on the curb of Gideon Caster's home. It now homed Layla Weiss, Caster's fiancee. The house was elegant, a sign of upper-class status. "Look at this place," Booth said looking at the house. "It's like a tiny mansion."

"No, Booth, that does not make sense unless you meant for it to be an oxymoron. A mansion is a large house. Tiny is small. The dwelling cannot be both," Brennan stepped out of the car.

He shook his head. "I didn't mean it literally, Bones."

"Oh, well, clarify it with a more appropriate adjective, please," she said as they walked up to the front door, knocking on the door amidst the conversation.

"That's why it's called an exaggeration," he butted in one final comment before the door was opened by a woman in her late twenties. She looked full of grief as if having never left her bed or eating in days.

"Layla Weiss?" Booth asked as the woman nodded. He showed his badge. "I'm Special Agent Seeley Booth from the FBI and this is Dr. Temperance Brennan from the Jeffersonian."

"Are you here about Gideon?" Hope filled her eyes. "Did you find him? Is he with you?" She was frantic, making this harder for Booth to execute.

"No, he's deceased," Brennan said. Booth flashed her a look of disapproval, though he felt her try to empathize in her comment, trying to sound more dearly than her usual self.

Layla stood quiet, feeling as if she spoke she would break down. "Wh-what happened? How…he was here. With me. Two weeks ago h-he just-he was here." She wailed. She had no tears, just full of apprehension and disbelief.

Brennan received a text from Cam.

 _Found cause of death. Tox screen showed abundant amounts of maitotoxin. The victim would have died within minutes of consumption._

"We believe there was foul play," Booth said, not making the situation any easier for the grieving lover.

"He was poisoned," Brennan said.

"Oh my god," the woman cried immensely but attempted to settle in embarrassment in front of the two.

"Did you know anyone who wanted to hurt Gideon? Any enemies from work?" Booth asked as calmingly as he could.

Layla stuttered her words as she hiccuped. "N-no. Uhm…he-he rarely ta-talked about work…Because he knew I w-wouldn't understand the t-terminology or anything," Booth smiled slightly, reminding him of Brennan and how ever since she had some conversational psychology thing with Sweets, she had attempted to do the same thing to him. It did not last though, she still spits anthropological whatchamacallits at an extensive rate. "He never invited any-anyone over for drinks because he k-kept to himself at work."

"Was there anything unusual about his behavior before he disappeared? Maybe a month or so ago?"

"No, he was always at home with me. A w-week before he, uhm...a week before he disappeared, he had a head cold so we both stayed at home."

"Can you tell us where you were two weeks ago the day he disappeared?" She had a look of resentment and anger with Booth's follow-up question.

"We're sorry to do this to you," Brennan said. "We're just doing our jobs, I hope you understand."

Booth smiled at her. She never attempted to soothe a person in an investigation before. What a change.

Layla was still angry at them but cooperated. "We just came home from a Caribbean cruise to celebrate the engagement. We had problems with our Visas the whole trip so I had to go to the embassy to straighten them out. You can look over the external camera stuff. Now please, if there's nothing else I can do to help you with your job, it would be nice if you left," she said the latter condescendingly, though not meaningfully. The grief took over her whole body.

Booth and Brennan looked at each other with an understanding of her state before walking back to the SUV.

"I thought of that," Booth said, breaking the comfortable silence that sat in the car for ten minutes.

Brennan looked up from the file. "Thought of what?"

"I was gonna get tickets to go abroad," he said, eyes still on the road. "To celebrate our engagement and stuff." She smiled, although she let out a snicker that did not go unnoticed by Booth. "What? You don't think it's a good idea? Is it too cheesy?"

Brennan composed herself. "I fear that you're being slightly hubristic."

Booth grew upset. "What? What are you talking about?"

"Your hubris," she clarifies. "I mean, I know extensively about such quality in your personality with your ' _Cocky_ ' belt buckle and having spent seven years being your confidant."

"Bones, what are you getting at?"

"All I am saying is—" she breathed. "—it is routinely typical of you to presume the outcome of the situation without having gone through the delivery yet. You have not actually asked her the question yet, and it's juvenile and, according to your nature, perpetually elementary of you to assume that her answer is yes." Brennan spoke in her usual tone, a factual, straight-to-the-point dagger that she was never aware she stabbed with so commonly.

Still upset, Booth responded, "so you don't think she'll say yes?"

"I did not say that."

"Okay, well then give me your opinion," the environment became testy to Booth. Brennan, however, remained her unfazed self, very unknowing of her ability to shift the nature of conversation so quickly. She does not mean for any conversation to grow as irascible as she unconsciously builds them to be.

"You know I cannot do that," she followed. "I do not have the evidence."

"Yes, you do, Bones! You know me. The evidence is me. Will she say yes to me?!"

"I do not see you the way she does, Booth." It stung him to hear that, just a little bit. "I see you as a partner, a man I can count on. I do not know the circumstances of which your relationship is built upon." Brennan looked over to him, trying to gauge his responses. Seeing that she had him so tense and agitated, she weighed her next words, for the first time actually thinking about what she was going to say instead of blatantly speaking like she had had. "Booth, I do not have the romantic experience to give you an insight into my opinion. I am not religious and I do not find importance in the practice of proposals and engagement and weddings. My opinion would not matter and does not give significant cadence in Hannah's decision."

He was not upset anymore, however, still indifferent. "But your opinion matters to me, Bones."

"I do not know why. I know my intelligence is obviously of great factor when it comes to people seeking my advice, but romance? I have practiced polygamy, Booth. I've been surrounded by so many cultural systems and so many diverse outlooks into relationships that my opinion would not matter in your current situation unless you are asking me, from an anthropological standpoint, about my analyses on those progressions."

He sighed, the conversation just exhausting him. The woman was a piece of work, no matter how much you got to know her. Booth dropped the matter like he always does every time they got into a predicament.

Booth stopped the car to let Brennan out before waving goodbye and reminding her that he will be back with any information. The car ride back to the lab was amicable despite the blazing conversation. It was just as they had always been, like a couple of bickering elderlies who forget about the conversation minutes after it happened and returning to their friendly nature.

Walking into the lab, Brennan was met with Hodgins. "Okay so all the particulates I found are consistent with anyone working in a hydraulic fracturing factories, but get this, I found particulates of Caesium-137." Hodgins talked and followed her as she went to her office and grabbed her lab coat, making her way to Cam as she put on the blue jacket.

"That's a radioactive isotope," she said, thinking of its significance. "That's common in some wells. The radiation produces gamma rays that give evaluations of the wells by measuring the density."

"Yes, exactly right."

"Okay, but we already know that the victim worked with the wells. So all you are telling me is that you have not reached any substantial evidence to help lengthen the factual aspects of the case, and instead found more information on things that we already know." Brennan spoke clearly and authoritatively, though nonchalant of her strictness. She left Hodgins standing outside the autopsy room, in complete dysphoria.

"Why is she all of a sudden so upset?" He asked as Angela walked by.

"Didn't the forensics team mess with her remains this morning?" She asked, clinging her tablet in her arm as they watched Brennan and Cam interact, Brennan seemingly growing more frustrated after seeing that the body had not been defleshed yet.

"Yeah, that's probably it. She's just a little tiny bit more irritable," Hodgins exclaimed as Angela laughed and kissed him on the cheek before they separated their ways.

* * *

"King of the lab!" Everyone knew whose mouth those words left, even the ones with auditory problems. Hodgins came running to Cam first before notifying Dr. Brennan. "Proppant." He exclaimed as he stepped into her office.

Brennan sighed, a little disappointed. "They use sand as proppant for hydraulic fracturing wells Dr. Hodgins."

His smug smile never left his face though. He held a file with all the information and gave it to the doctor. "At first I thought likewise, but looked through the composition and realized it was definitely not sand. It was also not gas. It was gel."

"Okay but, fracking grounds use gel as proppant, too," she fought.

Hodgins side. "Where's your faith in me, Dr. B? You doubt me too much."

"Of course, I do. I have to believe that factual information is questionable, despite the messenger or the finder. I do not practice with faith."

He shook his head, shrugging off her comments like he always does because she is Dr. Temperance Brennan, and no matter her 162+ IQ and mental capacity, her social intelligence lacks immensely and has misled numerous with her etiquette. Jack Hodgins understands, though. "99% of the oil wells there use slickwater, Dr. Brennan. There is absolutely no way that the gel came from those grounds. The gel came from another fracking well. My guess? Another ground. He met with someone shortly before he died and shook hands with them. The hands held most of the concentration. So either he held hands with another petroleum engineer, high-fived them, or shook them, he was definitely with someone else."

Brennan smiled, "now that's substantial. Good work Dr. Hodgins." He nodded and left Brennan to herself to call Booth and give him information, but he did not answer. She decided to reach Aubrey instead and give him the details.

"Okay, well it can't be the fiancee. Her alibi checks out and she wouldn't have that substance on her," Aubrey responded in a muffled tone.

"Aubrey what-are you eating?"

"Yes of course I am. It's lunch, Dr. B." He laughed at her before noticing something in his computer. "Gideon's boss came back from a business meeting two weeks ago from Texas." Aubrey typed one key at a time, one of his hands occupied with a hamburger, while the nondominant typed away. "The place he visited was another fracking site, and guess what they use?"

"Gel?"

"Gel." Aubrey took another giant bite before telling Brennan to talk to Booth.

She tried Booth again and realized that he is at lunch with Hannah. He picked up, though, laughing at something Hannah probably said.

"Hey, we gotta talk to the boss. Pick me up and I'll fill you in," she said, grabbing her stuff. She heard kissing noises in the background, Booth stifling a laugh. "Oh, I wasn't aware you were having sexual intercourse."

"Bones. Don't say that, that's weird." He said in the midst of putting back his dress shirt on, though Hannah kept planting kisses on his neck that Temperance heard clearly over the phone.

"I can wait if you'd like. Your biological urges need to be satisfied, clearly." She laughed a little at his lack of denial. No matter how cocky or confident he was, Booth always made sure to stay out of conversations regarding his sex life or anything remotely close to the sort.

"Nope, they have been taken care of, though thank you. It's nice to know you care," he joked, but as suspected, she did not catch it.

"As an anthropologist, I've studied the mating patterns o-"

"Don't finish that sentence. I'm coming to get you right now." There was scuffling in the phone and he had forgotten to hang up as he put the shoes on. "We'll talk about it later, okay? I love you," Bones heard the faint conversation. Her conscience told her to hang up, but irrationally, she did not.

Booth arrived in ten minutes. The moment she got in the car, she clearly saw the distress that was done to his suit. It was wrinkled out of all proportions and his hair was tousled, rather messy and going in all directions as if someone tried to pull them out.

"She said yes," Booth said as they drove through the interstate.

"To what?"

"I asked her to marry me." His face lit up like a Christmas tree again. "She said yes."

Her smile sparked congratulations but the world she had worked so hard to build, the cityscape of irrationality and hope that Booth had summoned within her, the illogical arcane fantasies she had taken years to convince herself to quit fighting, shattered. All at once, her utopia was devastated, its physiognomy falling into an abyss of what she could only explain as heartbreak.

Hearts do not break. They puncture, they burst, they bleed. But she does not break. It is simply impossible.


	3. Shot Number Six

**Disclaimer:** They would've been married from the start if I owned it.

* * *

They had talked to Gideon's boss, Jaret Fields. Apparently, he invited Gideon to dinner to discuss a promotion. That is why he had returned from Texas. He got a new job in a better state with better pay and offered his seat to Gideon. He had no alibi after their dinner, but even then, their leads reached a pause.

She wanted to go home, insisting that she catch up on sleep. It was seven o'clock though, children do not even sleep that early.

"We always go to Founding Fathers, Bones," he pleaded. It was as if nothing big had happened in their dynamic. It was as if the world still spun to him.

 _Of course, it did, Temperance. The Earth was formed from a cloud disc that spun it like a top and because of the laws of inertia, it will never stop._

But her world seemed to be in slow motion, though. Ever since he dropped a bomb (an atomic bomb), her world shook and suddenly physics do not apply. It was illogical, how her vision would blur and how nausea would come over her out of nowhere, forcing her to quickly grab something in hopes it would soothe the illness out of her. She did not know why it was happening. She found out about it five hours ago. In those five hours, she had never been more sick in her life.

"Whaddya say, Bones?" He smiled at her, waiting for an answer with his hand stretched out, wanting her to take it so he could lead her there.

She felt nauseous again. And the closest thing she could hold onto was his hand. So she grabbed it, and goddammit, she did not want to. But she did and her world suddenly spun faster than she wanted and she is now four shots of tequila in. Booth was still on his first beer, talking to her about how it all happened.

"I thought we were gonna go to the diner for lunch but she said she made food at home. And I was like, wow, how domesticated is that?" She was going to answer before she realized it was a rhetorical question. She smiled. Although she was drunk, it felt like she was normal again. It was just the way it was, Booth was happy and she was happy for his happiness. That was how it had been the past year. Her world returned to its pace, even though her inebriation guaranteed that it will only last until she had a real pathological illness in the morning from alcohol poisoning. The earth will probably spin slowly again after that. "And then we ate. And–" he could not stop himself from laughing. "Sh-she went to the room, right? And she was going to get her watch, but then-but then…" he trailed into laughter before taking a swig. She watched with amusement. His happiness radiated into her. "But then she tripped!" Booth probably blew up the entire place with his jubilance, catching eyes around the bar. She did not care for that. She loved this. Just the two of them, no matter the subject of their conversation. "So earlier at like three a.m., I was measuring her finger and then I hid the tape under the bed and totally forgot about it. She found it when she fell. Then she asked me and I lied and said it was for the tailor of my suits but she knew my size, and I certainly knew my measurements…" He kept talking but all Brennan could do was gulp and foster in this topic of his measurement. She should not think about it. She was his best friend. She should definitely not. "And then I gave in and told her I was measuring for her ring size earlier and she just stood there in shock. I didn't know what to do so I proposed there even without a ring. I proposed with a piece of shrimp that she had cooked." He smiled at the thought. Brennan was not a romantic. She did not find the shrimp engagement thing anymore appealing than she would a regular proposal with a diamond ring, but she understood most other women. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the average modern woman's dream, to be proposed to extraordinarily. With a damn shrimp.

She swigged shot number six.

* * *

Brennan called Sweets. She thinks it was a butt-dial really. "H-hey Laaaaance." Her voice echoed through the phone as she laid on the floor, having fallen from the couch where Booth left her after dropping her off at her apartment.

"Dr. Brennan? Is everything alright?" He sounded tired but piqued at the tone of her poisoned voice.

"It's been sweet, Sweets," she laughed way too loud at the joke. "Get it?!" Her snort made Sweets chuckle at the other end. "I'm fine, really. I find that intoxication is a very efficient way of withholding my emotions to a substantiated level of consciousness. I-I know I, uhm, called psychology a soft science, and th-though I still believe in such, I have become fond of subjective explanations. It's like you guys make up answers and theorize it so it becomes true so really you make your own answers which makes it more like a humanity than a science anyway." He sighed through the phone. She is more offensive drunk than her regular sober self. "I have made a sepulcher of my emotional battles and found that it helps to bury them. Like a ritual. It's like v-virtual anthropology. The Catacombs in Paris is the world's largest grave. I went there twice. There were soooooo many bones. It was bones upon bones upon bones. Crânes stacked upon crânes."

"Crânes?" He interrupted her with a question.

"It's French for s-skull," she hiccuped. "Maybe if I imagine my subconscious to be as big as the Catacombs I could bury all my problems."

"Okay, Dr. Brennan, I'm coming over. You clearly need help with the drunkenness." He expected a protest, but she was mumbling something away from the phone, probably forgetting all about him.

"I drank like twenty-seventeen shots," she said as she opened the door after a couple knocks from Sweets.

"Dr. Brennan, that's not a real number." He led her to the couch and fixed her up a water.

She drank the water in one swig and sat on the couch, slumped over her own thoughts. For a second she looked like she was thinking, the gears running in her head the way SoberBrennan thought. "I don't know." She said after being silent for ten minutes. She fiddled with the rim of her glass.

"What is it that you don't know, Dr. Brennan?" He sat on the couch across as if he were sat in his own office.

"How he could do it." That was all she said for awhile. Sweets did not talk, encouraging her to continue. "He-he didn't think twice about it. I-I don't understand the rationale, the logic behind it. People should list pros and cons, or write persuasive essays to themselves before actually undertaking any life-changing activity. He didn't think."

"Who, Dr. Brennan?"

"Booth!" She stood up angrily in dramatic fashion. "He-he proposed to her! Just like that! They've been together, what? Nine months. Isn't that a short time to consummate the relationship? I could have a baby in nine months!"

Sweets stifled his amusement. DrunkBrennan was definitely a sight to see. "Yes, well, according to biology, that is correct."

Brennan ignored him. "Anthropologically speaking, average people would be in a relationship pre-nuptials for one to two years before marriage even becomes a question." She paced, distraught with her conflicting emotions about the length of their union rather than the actual problem she was facing with the engagement.

"Booth proposed to Hannah?" Sweets found himself in shock. He was speechless for a moment, highly unlikely for the psychologist in his caliber.

"Yes! With a shrimp! A decapod!" She grew near angry, not with anyone, in particular, just the world for spinning so slow. "He professed his life with a crustacean, Dr. Sweets."

"And you're angry at him," he completed.

"No." She slumped back down on the couch. "I-I don't know what I'm feeling, Sweets."

He stood up, going to the kitchen to grab himself a water. "Perhaps you're adjusting, Dr. Brennan. To see Booth with someone else, and bond with another woman is new to you considering he's given you his full attention the past six years you have been partners. It's different—finding someone in his life who so much resembles yours. And before you say that she is unlike you because you are a genius, look at the facts. She is a woman who loves Booth. Booth loves her. She acts as a surrogate best friend when you're not around. Booth used to tell you his problems, and even though he still does, you're aware that he is just a little bit closer to her more than he is with you. No, I'm not delving into jealousy of some sort. To you, it feels like your brother moved out of the house, moved into another home, and found someone else to confide in. It's difficult to adjust to that." After filling his glass with water he went to sit back down across from Temperance only to find her dozing off in her sleep. He just sighed, smiling at the woman so dismayed with the first ever relationship she had ever found hope on—although, she did not "hope" or rely on her gut, she looked at facts and built conclusions from them. Whatever it was, there was a glint of optimism Sweets saw in her that reminded him of himself when he was with his adoptive parents. Booth was that sanctuary for Brennan.

He pulled a blanket over her and laughed a little. "Who am I kidding? You're jealous out of your mind and your stubborn nature prevents you from admitting that to yourself. I just hope you figure it out soon."

Throughout the last three years of knowing her, he understood that him unraveling the depth of her own feelings to her sent the woman in denial. It was always better to get her to accept what she felt. It was what made him great at his job and what made Brennan so unlike everyone else in her field. She didn't care about her feelings, and even if it made Sweets uneasy considering that he practically majored in the art of ' _how to not bury emotions_ ', she was incognizant of her thoughts and finding them by herself was part of the jaunt that came with the discovery of her emotional capacity.

She was capable of loving, she just does not know it yet.


	4. Siblinghood

**Disclaimer** **:** In my dreams, I do.

* * *

Brennan was first in the lab like always. She was early enough that she would cross paths with the night watch. She had sunglasses on despite the overcast, sunless November weather. She may be able to handle her liquor but she was no god.

Her seat was cold; her whole entire office was cold. The world spun twice as fast. She feels she liked it better slower. Either way, nausea hovered over her like the boogieman.

She glanced at the outline laid on the glass wall and felt the spark of creativity that drove her writing binges. Once she opened the laptop though, all the inspiration she had transpired dissipated, reaching an impasse. Normally she would understand, but rarely does she ever go through them considering that her strict outlines already tell her what to write. Her intelligence also allows her to arrange with ease, only adding up to the confusion as to why the heck she lost her drive.

Temperance groaned and stared at the screen, propping both elbows on the desk and putting her chin in her hands. Her sunglasses made it seem like she was looking at the blank page when she actually fell asleep. For how long? Nobody knows. She only jerked when Hodgins came rushing in with information.

"So that maitotoxin present from the tox screen? It was isolated from a dinoflagellate." He typed keys on the computer, opening a picture of the bacteria. " _Gambierdiscus toxicus_. Guess where it's present?"

"Considering that you have the answer, I don't feel that that is necessary." She replied, hiding the grogginess in her voice.

"It's common across shores of the Pacific Ocean. This one that I examined," he typed more stuff, zooming in on a map. Brennan knew the geography too well.

"The Caribbean," they said together.

"I'll call Booth. Gideon was just at the Caribbean with his fiancee," she continued as he nodded his head and walked out of her office. She groaned, her head still throbbing. The world reeled too slow again.

Booth and Aubrey interrogated her. It should have gone better but they just devastated her. Man, he hates this job sometimes. "Her alibi checks out, though. There must be something we're missing." Booth said, walking to the break room. Aubrey was chewing on a muffin.

"I checked Gideon's finances and look," Aubrey handed him the file. It had smeared chocolate on it.

"God, Aubrey," Booth grabbed it anyway, reading through the monetary tables. "It says here he owed a man named Owens seven thousand dollars. I don't know about you but that sounds like motive to me.

"It tastes like motive," Aubrey finished. Booth stared at him before smacking his chest with the file.

* * *

A cup was softly set on her desk. She had her head in her arms on the table, making him think she was still asleep. He was almost out the door when he heard a faint "thanks, Booth". He chuckled and turned around, making his way back.

"How you doin', Bones?"

"I feel sick to my intestines," she groaned, propping the sunglasses to her forehead and sipping out of the coffee cup.

"Sick to my stomach," he corrected, taking a chair and handing her a file. "We have a lead. He owes some guy some money. I'm gonna check it out."

"I'll come with you," she mustered. She was about to grab her jacket when he protested.

"Nope, not this time. I'm taking Aubrey with me," he smiled.

"Booth, just yesterday you were begging me to go out into the field with you."

"Yeah, but right now you need to rest."

"I am fully aware that the amount of alcohol I drank last night would lead to ethanol poisoning. Someone as rational as myself understands her limits, therefore, I did not drink more than I knew I was capable of handling. So, yes, I am going," she insisted. He stayed seated on the chair though. "What? Are we going or not?"

"No," he said firmly. "No offense, Bones, but you look like hell."

"I am most certain that you do not know what hell looks like, Booth."

"It's an expression," Booth sighed. "It just means that you look very horrific."

She gasped, "Then, I do take offense, Booth. I've drunk an herbal remedy and have been very attentive as of late. I am fine."

"If you say so," he smiled again. She hates that. "I won't be leaving for awhile though, I feel like going through evidence."

"You rarely look at evidence."

"I know, I just feel like there's something we're missing here," he stood to leave and she sat back down.

"And you are getting that feeling from your gut?" She asked with an eyebrow raised.

He smirked, "You know it."

"I have gone over it countless times, the gut has no cerebral capacity and is incapable of actual thought. Your gut is merely stomach acid and intestinal fluid."

He shook his head. "When has my gut failed me, Bones?"

"It has not."

"Ha! See!"

"But statistically, it will fail. If they are mere guesses, just take the variables of average suspects per each case and divide it by a hundred. Then another to the number of cases we have d-"

He chuckled, "I got it, Bones. Since it has yet to let me down, I'll continue to stick with it." He was out by the doorjamb.

"Thank you, Booth, really. For everything."

"Anytime, Bones."

"No, I mean," she sighed and leaned back in her chair. "You've been more of a brother to me than Russ ever was. I mean I love him, but you've been the family I never thought I wanted."

Booth's smile grew wider, though it was not the ear-to-ear that she was accustomed to seeing whenever he found himself in proximity to Hannah. Somehow, the thought saddened her. He was okay with being her older brother, but Temperance just felt that being comfortable with such siblinghood meant that she had to surrender everything else she thought she felt. It was an intellectual relationship, one of chaste and Platonism. "I'm always here for you, Bones." He left and she continued to stare at the spot he vacated. The invisible silhouette she imagined remained there, never leaving her. He said he was always there and he may have meant it, but even she felt it was a pretense. He meant for it to be a reassurance, but to her, it was a promise.

The difference was that he never promises anything to her. He always reassures. This one was not guaranteed.


	5. Musky Candle

**Disclaimer:** I'm not FOX Network.

* * *

"I hate putting my car through this," Booth complained as he drove the SUV through ground and gravel. They drove three hours into the backcountry where Owens apparently lived. His house was hours from the nearest town and ventures deep into a field. Brennan almost regrets coming along, the shaking of the vehicle causing revulsions with what was left of the ethanol in her system. She does not tell Booth, though. She refuses to give him the satisfaction that he was right. Her phone rang.

"Brennan."

Ms. Daisy Wick resonated through the speaker. "There is a small, barely noticeable nick on the posterior aspect of the C4. I asked Dr. Hodgins for a swab, but I'm most certain that the markers are consistent with a needle."

"That is probably where the victim was intoxicated by maitotoxin," Brennan responded as Booth closely listened, despite the fact that the noise of rubble hitting the car drove him crazy.

"I told him that, but he says that it is highly unlikely that the killer could isolate maitotoxin from the dinoflagellate. The killer would need to be greatly skilled and also in a very sterile place in order to extract the substance and then centrifuge it. He would also need to be in a hazmat suit. Right now, he is undergoing a conspiracy that it came from the CDC."

"No, that would be wrong. The Center for Disease and Control Prevention would not keep a toxin in-house. They specialize in viruses."

Daisy laughed. "Hodgins seems to think that they are running underground agendas for world contamination."

Brennan rolled her eyes. She hung up as Booth pulled up outside of a craftsman house, the horror movie-kind of house where killers take their victims. "Seems like a good place to bring someone to kill."

"The highest decibel ever recorded for a distressed human scream would be around 125. Considering how isolated this home is from civilization, I agree. The nearest neighbor is five miles away, far enough to guarantee complete seclusion." She stepped down the car and closed the door behind her.

"I don't think anyone's home," Booth said as he scouted around the house. They walked around the lot almost circling back until he heard a scuffle and protectively pushed Brennan against the wall behind him. They were on the side of the house, him having full vision of his black car. She remain unfazed, despite her full awareness that her front was touching all of his back as he guarded her protectively. He pulled his gun and felt Brennan's breath on his neck. The hairs on his neck rose. Booth felt it and Brennan saw it. She acted obliviously and felt his shoulders tense a little bit when she spoke straight into his ear.

"Can I have a gun?"

"Really, Bones, right now?" He said in a shouted whisper as he peered around.

"Uhm, currently is actually the best time for me to be holding a firearm considering that you feel we are in danger."

"Didn't you hear that?"

"I thought it was the wind."

"What?"

"Yeah, there was a breeze. The rustle was from the bushes." He sighed and placed the Glock back in his concealment holster. "Why are you so jumpy, Booth?"

"Bones, you're hungover. I need to be twice as alert." He responded as they walked up the three steps to the door.

"You smell musky," she said nonchalantly as he stared at her with furrowed brows. "It reminds me of this candle I love." Booth looked at her, this time in confusion and another set of spiraling emotions he was not aware existed. She had no idea that she just admitted to loving his smell.

"Okay, Bones," he has knocked about three separate times. He sighed and went to his ankle to hand her the gun. "Now you need it."

"Why?"

"Just-" he fiddled with the lock. "If anyone asks, the door was unlocked."

"But it wasn't."

"I know, Bones," he stepped inside, the gun in his hand. He did not wait for her to get it. The partners made minimal noise as they looked around the house. They were almost through when Brennan called for him. "What is it, Bones?"

"Blood," she stated, as one hand held a gun and the other with a fluorescent light. "I need to do a work up because I don't think this is Gideon Caster's."

"What makes you think that?" He asked as she rummaged through the belongings for evidence.

"Gideon did not bleed. There was no foul play present. He was drug-" Brennan stopped mid-sentence, gaining Booth's curiosity.

"Did you find something?"

She turned holding a syringe. "This could be the murder weapon, Booth."

"Okay, but it still doesn't add up. Who's blood is that?"

She sighed and shrugged, Booth already in the motion for calling the forensic experts at the FBI.

* * *

Brennan was in the bone room. The poisoning subsided and she was back to her full self again. She inspected every bone in detail, looking for anything that could augment evidence.

Hodgins walked in, typing at the computer. The words "Morphine Diacetate" popped up on the screen.

"Heroin? He was taking opiates?" She said, setting a radius down.

"No, that's the thing." He was typing away again. "It came back from the Mass Spectrometer run of his clothing. Cam did another tox screen, but there were no drugs in his system. And what makes it even more complicated," he pulled up a picture, "I ran the swab that Daisy asked me to and," more typing, "there was heroin on the bone. The syringe and needle you found at the scene were a match, also."

"Okay, but that makes no sense. If the victim's bone sustained the opiates, it would definitely mean that he was injected." Hodgins nodded, but could not find a response. The situation flummoxed them both. She sighed and grabbed her phone, dialing Booth's number as Hodgins walked out.

They sat at the diner across from each other with Aubrey sitting beside Brennan. "The forensics team said that he could not have gotten the mainotoxingy from the Caribbean. The timeline does not add up to time of death."

"Maitotoxin," Brennan corrected as she sipped her coffee. Booth kept looking at the file. "Wait, my lab was pretty accurate about the dosage and time of death. It lines well with their vacation."

"Yes, except the victim died on American soil."

The wheels in her head turned. "Yeah the amount of the toxin would have killed him instantly," she pondered. Aubrey kept eating away at the burger.

Sweets suddenly made his way next to Booth, the table getting more crowded. "Hello, Dr. Brennan, how are you?"

"I'm good, Dr. Sweets," she replied as Booth felt confounded by their exchange.

"The FBI forensics lab may actually be better than yours if you think about it," Booth said.

Brennan just laughed, reading through the file. "I doubt it. The Jeffersonian is widely renowned for its prestige and influence. It is highly unlikely that the FBI will ever surpass my Medico-Legal lab, let alone the whole institution to your abecedarian laboratory."

Booth whispered something in Sweets' ear and he responded in an extremely low whisper, however still deducible by Brennan. "It's a person learning the alphabet."

They whispered back and forth. "What does that even mean?"

"It's an insult. It means beginner or amateur." Sweets shielded his mouth with his hand and Brennan pretended not to hear. The boys were making her case for her just with the way this was going.

Booth turned to the table conversation., "Abecedarian?" He looked at Brennan with disbelief. "Did she just call the FBI abecedarian?!"

She nodded. "I apologize for my diatribe, but I speak facts."

"She does, Agent Booth," Sweets chimed, getting a glare from the man.

"Also, you're aware that it's Cam's lab, right? Not yours."

"It is, but more widely known to the country, the Jeffersonian is almost always associated with my name," she spoke incognizant to the lack of modesty.

"No, it's associated with Thomas Jefferson," Aubrey spoke for the first time.

"Well, yes of course, but to modern day, if someone hears the Jeffersonian, I am likely the immediate successor of discussion." She sipped her coffee, flipping the files.

"No one really associates institutions to anyone, Bones."

"That is untrue," she set the coffee down and pointed at Sweets. "Even pseudo-scientists like Dr. Zimbardo, I mean you hear his name and you think Stanford, correct?"

He was about to object to her harangue but nodded in agreement. "That is an excellent point."

"What? That psychology is a soft science?" He smirked at Sweets who turned to respond but Brennan beat him to it.

She said with certitude, "Well, of course, a man with the intellectual capacity as Dr. Sweets should already be aware of that."

"Sometimes, I find it extremely difficult to hold conversations with you because I feel I misinterpret your intentions if you mean to offend me with your compliments." Booth laughed.

"Of course not, that is why they are compliments, Dr. Sweets." He just nodded in surrender. Aubrey continued to eat when Brennan's head shot up. "I got it. I know what happened." She stood and darted out of the diner, Booth following frantically behind her.

"Bones, I drove you here," he yelled after her.

"I am aware which is why you should drive me back to the lab," she got into the passenger seat.

"What is it? What happened?"

"All this time we have been assuming that the victim died simultaneously with the poisoning," she said.

He looked at her, dumbstruck. "That's because he did. Your lab said so."

"I am aware and they are correct."

"Okay, I'm still lost."

"He died instantaneously when the poisoning level reached the amount present in the tox screen. Booth, he received small dosages over a period of time. Maitotoxin doesn't leave your system, it stays there and manifests. He may have been getting very small amounts of it that built up and metastasized." Brennan sat back as Booth came to the realization. He noticed another light bulb go off in her head. "His fiancee, Layla Weiss, said that he was sick a week before they disappeared. That's when his immune system shut down."

He smiled at her. Damn, he would never get used to her genius. He loved that.


	6. Your World Expands

**Disclaimer:** I know each episode like the back of my hand, but even then I still don't own 'em. Shucks.

* * *

Brennan was back in her lab coat, looking through the cataloged injuries. She opened the file for her novel, looking back at the outline and going to type in her book. Booth, however, barged into the office saying "we got another body." That was all it took for Brennan to leave the facility.

"Two in three days? We haven't even solved the Gideon case yet," she said, walking into his car.

"Something tells me this will help us solve it." He pulled out of the parking structure and headed west, the direction where Gideon's body was found.

Brennan just laughed. "Who told you? Your gut?"

"Nope," he said, handing her the file. "It's Owens."

She grabbed the folder and looked through it. "You've identified him? What do you need me for?"

"They asked for you there. I heard he was already decomposing. There's plenty of bones, Bones," he smiled. "We got an ID from his wallet. The killer left it on him."

"How do you know he was killed?"

"Come on, Bones. We were at the house together. You were the one that discovered the blood."

"It could be suicide."

"Highly unlikely. Owens dying in one place then his body found somewhere else? That screams foul play."

"That's true, but I don't want to eliminate any of the possibilities regarding his death, you know that." She flipped through the pages of the case.

Booth smiled and nodded.

Brennan walked out in her suit, bending down to examine the decaying face. "He has no clothes. Definitely a body dump," Dr. Saroyan spoke as she looked at the victim's torso.

"I concur," Brennan responded.

"Told ya, Bones," Booth walked around with his pen and notes. "Any of you have time of death for me, yet?"

"See these maggots?" Hodgins said, grabbing one from the ground with tweezers and gearing to put it in Booth's line of sight.

"Okay, bug boy cut to the chase," he said in disgust.

"They've begun burying into the ground. The pupae formation suggests two to three weeks. These parasitoid wasps, however," Hodgins grabs another insect. "They suggest the victim died approximately three weeks ago."

"That's before Gideon," Booth said in surprise.

Brennan nodded, "Which means he couldn't have killed him." She looked around the skull. "There's damage to the zygomatic and the left maxilla. These are consistent with blows to the head."

"Enough to kill him?" Booth asked Brennan.

"Enough to bruise him, but kill him? No." She sighed and looked at it again. "The damage shows that they were two separate hits, meaning our victim didn't run into a wall or any of the sort. He was definitely hit. There's evidence of micro-fracturing and-" Brennan formed a fist and mimicked a punch to cheekbone. "-Either our killer was really weak or had small hands."

"It couldn't have been from a small weapon?"

"With the way it's looking? No. This definitely came from a punch, but the assailant wouldn't have sustained any major injuries according to the fracture pattern and minimal index on the victim. I can't really see anymore until we get these cleaned up," Brennan explained as she stood up and removed her gloves.

"I found cause of death," Cam said.

"Already?" Brennan squatted again.

"Stab wounds," she indicated with her fingers the points of contact. "About three here."

"Each one is fatal, especially this," Brennan pointed to a wound that most clearly aligns with the heart. "The weapon was driven through the second intercostal space of the left side of the body. It nicked ribs two and three and would have reached the heart. According to the pattern of the stabs, this was first, but the killer stabbed him two more times here," she pointed as Booth hovered over her. "The manubrium is damaged along with the fourth rib."

Booth sighed and wrote down all the information. "Okay, but Gideon's death was different. Someone definitely wanted this guy dead, but Gideon spanned over a period of time." Brennan nodded. "Something tells me there are two different killers."

"Whoever they are, they're surely connected. Though, I would not want to jump to conclusions," she arose and walked to the car. "Let's get this back to the lab," she told one of the forensics guys.

Cam laughed slightly and shared a look at Booth, shaking her head at Brennan being Brennan.

* * *

Brennan sat back down at her desk. She saw that the window to her book was still open. She began to type when she realized that none of the words that formed on the screen were words at all. She spoke eight languages and understood zero of the letters that spat out on the screen. She was still at that same impasse she encountered yesterday. Brennan's face found its way in her palms. There are few things in her life that she did not understand. She usually does research on things she does not comprehend, but this? She was unable to fathom what kind of morass she found herself in. Sweets would say something along the lines of 'you are caught in a skein of personal quagmire'. Brennan had no problems with herself. There were no internal conflicts. She felt no ambivalence towards any intra-personal emotions.

"That's called cognitive dissonance, Dr. Brennan" she remembered him say once. "You have inconsistent thoughts. You are rational. Booth is not. But what's been a pattern of occurrence is that you are suddenly taking into account the possibility of believing what Booth believes."

"That is simply not possible," she had responded. "Booth believes in irrational love. He believes in God and feels the answer lies in the Bible, an antiquated collection of novels and allegories and fables. He says he thinks with his heart, which is a muscle that pumps blood. He relies on fate. That's ludicrous."

This session was held a week after Booth had spoken to her on the Hoover steps. "You and Agent Booth have been partners for five years now, Dr. Brennan. The rate of your exposure to each other means that, statistically, there should be a crossover of some sort. The physical proximity that you two have found yourselves in for these past years have substantiated a connection. Agent Booth is likely more rational now than he was before he met you. Likewise, you're a little less empirical."

"I refuse to believe that personality diffuses, Dr. Sweets. It is not a virus."

"Okay, look at it this way," he explained, shifting in his seat. "You're an anthropologist. You believe in the dispersion of culture, right?"

"That is correct."

"Essentially, it is of similar circumstance."

"The propagation of beliefs is different from the dissemination of personality. You can relay information and persuade others to believe what you believe, but what you are telling me is that I have somehow, unknowingly, taken a similar psyche to Booth, minimally. I don't believe it. Booth has not persuaded me to believe in God, similar to how I have yet to dissuade him of his religion."

Sweets leaned back in his chair, sighing. "I did not mean that suddenly, in the past five years, you have become spiritual or Booth no longer believes in his god." He put his elbow on the arm rest. "The longer you spend time with Agent Booth, the more your world expands, Dr. Brennan. You have seen him with Parker. You see him interact with people around him, seeing how much faith and kindness he extorts. Are you telling me that if you had never met Agent Booth, you would still view the world the way you see it now?"

She was silent for a moment. "The rational answer is no. But I still believe that I have not changed so excessively that I would be indistinguishable to the person I was years ago. I don't think Booth has influenced my growth in any way. He is simply just here, in a world that I have built for myself. He may be the deuteragonist, but I am still the principal character in my own domain. He's, simply...just, he's just there while I grow."

Sweets manifested his patience as best he can. Intelligent people were always stubborn. "Two years ago you wanted to have a child. Would you have thought that seven years ago?"

"Seven years ago I was twenty-seven and working on my career. Of course not."

"What about four years ago? Agent Booth made it clear to me that a certain baby you worked with on a case changed you up a little bit more than you let on."

"Andy? He was a baby we had to take care of because he swallowed evidence."

"And Booth said that you still did not want a baby then."

"That is correct. Only recently did I realize that it would be a shame to not produce a progeny, Dr. Sweets. My genome would go to waste." Sweets laughed a little bit. She was something else.

"Why did you choose Agent Booth, though?"

"You asked me that before already. He had personality traits that are not documented on other donors. He is courageous and kind. Obviously, that is something I want for my child."

"Mhm," Sweets nodded with a smile. "You have bonded with Agent Booth, Dr. Brennan."

"Of course I have. It is only natural for primates to build relationships especially with ones whom they feel can benefit their lives. Booth is like that to me. He's a protector despite my constant protest. Obviously, I do not need him to protect me, but a network ensures safety. Anthropologically, it is an evolutionary necessity."

"You came to me, regardless of your constant discord with the science of psychology."

"It's because I needed someone to talk to that was not Booth."

"Or because you put more credence in psychology than you admit."

"That is untrue. See, as of right now, you are telling me what my emotions are. You do not feel what I feel, Dr. Sweets. Therefore, you would not know."

"That's where science failed you, Dr. Brennan. You are an anthropologist. You study culture. I study human interaction. I majored in human behavior. You cannot deny the existence of how a person thinks. You and Agent Booth go out into the field every day to look for someone who has motive and opportunity. Motive? That is psychology." He paused and continued when she failed to respond. "It is okay that you cannot confess to your acknowledgment of this science. I am not here to defend the field. I am here to show you that you had a reason for coming here. Just like you have a rational reason for doing everything else that you do. You could have gladly gone to Angela, you know that. You came here with a question about yourself. You are looking for an answer you know I can give you. And I have given you exactly that, Dr. Brennan.

Agent Booth is a part of your life. It will take you time to realize just how much."


	7. Fake Sickness

**Disclaimer:** Nah.

* * *

"This metacarpal," Brennan said to Daisy. "There's a small fracture here," she aimed the camera projector to the part of the hand, showing Daisy where there was a small line on Gideon's hand bone.

"I can't believe I missed that," Daisy sighed.

"I can," Brennan responded. "This is my ninth go-around with the bones and just saw it. It's fairly common to miss something as small as this the first consultation." Ms. Wick smiled at the unlikely cordial comment.

"I saw it but thought it was just an anomaly."

"I didn't feel that it was relevant, considering the remodeling shows it's an antemortem injury, but-" Brennan closed her hand into a fist "-it shows that the victim hit something like so-" she lightly slammed her fist on the table, like a judge's gavel. She looked at the small bone again, her eyes narrowed in confusion. It quickly changed, however, when she felt she had just gathered all the answers in the world. Brennan dropped the bone back to its place and ran to the autopsy room, leaving Daisy in a fit of confusion.

"Dr. Saroyan?" She said as she walked in.

"Dr. Brennan, I am almost done with the bones. Ten more minutes and you can have them," Cam said as she took what was left of a kidney.

"No need," Brennan made her way opposite Cam on the autopsy table. She brought her hand up, similar to what she had done in the bone room, and mimicked hammering it down on to the victim's maxilla and again on his zygomatic. "These micro-fractures came from Gideon."

"What? Are you sure?" Cam asked in surprise.

"I most certainly am. The fracture pattern is consistent with a remodeled schism on Gideon's metacarpal. I'll relay the information to Booth." Cam nodded and watched her walk out.

* * *

"He had a pocket knife in evidence," Booth said, eating a french fry. "I told you something was off. My gut was right again."

"You said something was off, but you weren't specific. Everything in a homicide investigation is off, Booth."

"Yeah, well I was right to look over the evidence again," he sighed as he stole another french fry from her plate. "But it was clean. There was no evidence of foul play in the knife. They took it apart, too. No blood."

"Well, get it to Hodgins just in case. If it matches, it makes the job a little less difficult."

"Also, I had Aubrey check into Owens's accounts. The seven thousand was going to someone else. He was just a middleman."

"Have you picked a date?" Her focus shifted suddenly. It was astonishing how she lacks conversational transition skills, still.

"A what?" He stopped stealing the potatoes.

"A date. I heard that engagements last awhile," she said as he smiled. Christmas tree.

"We were thinking of eloping actually."

She did not attempt to try to hide her excitement. Consequently, she actually had none. "What? No."

He chuckled slightly at her reaction. "It would be more efficient. I would actually think you'd agree."

"Why is that?"

"It takes less money, less time, less planning, and quicker for me to not be wifeless anymore," he joked.

"Okay, but I was going to be your best man."

"How do you know I won't pick Aubrey? Or Sweets? Or my brother?"

"You wouldn't pick Aubrey because he'd be eating up at the altar. Sweets would bother you with psychobabble, and Jared is in India." He laughed. For someone who had zero social skills, she certainly knew them.

There was a silence. Just the two of them smiling at each other. "Yeah, well as for the date, I wouldn't really mind as soon as possible."

"A date consists of a month, a day, and a year, Booth." She felt the world turning slower again. As soon as possible.

He laughed. Still a Christmas tree. "Sometime in January." That was two months away. Why was it so close? He went back to stealing fries.

"Don't you want a church wedding, though?"

"Nah," he said mid-chew. "I love Hannah. We could get married in a dumpster and I'd be fine."

"That would be very difficult and inefficient, Booth. It would have to be a dumpster with no trash because you both would not fit."

He laughed again. "You're right. The courthouse it is."

She was okay with the world spinning slowly for now. It meant that it took longer to get to January. She still grew nauseous sometimes, though. Brennan had been taking pills to counteract her digestive system, and some to help with the occasional migraine. She didn't know why it was happening to her, but she did not care for a doctor visit anyway. She did go to Sweets, though.

"You have symptoms of conversion disorder, but you don't have conversion disorder," Sweets said as he shifted the books in his shelf, his back to Brennan who was on the couch.

"What is that?"

"A somatoform disorder," he said, turning. "It's a mental illness that causes bodily symptoms, but it can't be traced back to a medical cause. It's like pseudo-sickness."

"Fake science and fake sickness. You're really not helping your case of convincing me that psychology is a science, Dr. Sweets," she sighed as she crossed her legs.

"It just means that there is no pathological explanation for your sickness. The emotional components affect your physical equilibrium." He went back to shifting through his books.

"That really doesn't sound like a sickness. I feel sick. My head hurts and I want to vomit, but I don't know why."

He finally saw the book he was looking for. "I knew you've had it for the past day."

She laughed in disbelief. "How exactly?"

"Your body language. You would hold your head to the side whenever you felt something. I saw it at the diner a couple days ago. You drank coffee but you had Aubrey finish your plate."

"I'm just generous."

"You haven't eaten in the past day, huh?"

"Is that congruent with my symptoms?"

"No, but it's compatible to the somatoform disorder."

"Okay, well, can you fix the fake sickness with magic?"

"You don't believe in magic," Sweets said in a humorous tone.

"I don't believe in pseudo-illness either."

"It's a real thing," he continued, handing her the book. It was all about somatoform disorders. He felt it was the only way to convince her about what she was feeling. "You're experiencing a gigantic emotional change, Dr. Brennan. Your cortisol levels rise with the stress-"

"That phenomena I am aware of because it is scientifically proven. The endocrine system compensates with the way you take care of your body. This illness, however, makes no sense," she said, reading the synopsis of the book.

"It's a similar concept. Your brain tries to offset the chemical imbalances. You've probably been fairly low on serotonin," he said, knowing exactly why. She did not respond. "You don't have conversion disorder. You just have something like it. And you don't have an illness, you're just having emotional difficulties."

Yes, emotional difficulties.

Booth is getting married in two months. Emotional difficulties is an understatement.


	8. Partners

**Disclaimer:** No, I don't own Bones.

* * *

"The pocket knife is a match," Daisy said as Brennan walked in with a pair of loose gloves in her hand. "It's been cleaned so there are no traces of blood, but this nick on the end on the blade, it's consistent to the attacker having extended his force through the manubrium. It also matches this cleft at the second rib." Daisy was pointing all over the bones of Owens.

"Good job, Ms. Wick. Unfortunately, if evidence appears that Gideon indeed killed him, that gives us a dead end," she sighed as she picked up the skull.

"Actually," Daisy picked up a tablet to open up X-rays onto the large screen. "There's remodeling on the tibial tuberosity. The victim was hit with a spherical object just before getting killed. He may have gotten into a fight with his killer. And he has defensive wounds on the left radius and ulna, and sustained a hard hit on the lateral epicondyle."

"What about his hands?"

"There doesn't appear to be any fracturing on the metacarpals, meaning that he had not fought back, and this," Daisy picked up a bone from the pinky. "There's a nick on the fifth proximal phalange."

"That should be consistent with his stab wounds," Brennan said. "He was trying to shield himself, and that's where the injuries came from. He had his arm up from the first stab which hit his elbow and fractured the lateral epicondyle. After getting stabbed once, his arm lost weight, but it was still in front of him during the second stab resulting in the fractures on the forearm. He was already dying come the final stab, but his hand was still in the way so the blade chipped his pinky." Brennan sighed and said, "Thank you, Ms. Wick, great find." The intern nodded and left the bone room.

"I know what happened," Hodgins walked in with the usual king-of-the-lab smile. "The reason the heroin never showed up in the tox screen was because it actually wasn't in his system."

"That is very hard to believe," Brennan responded, half her attention focused on a tibia.

"Imagine a scenario where you are injected, but the syringe wasn't actually pushed," Hodgins pulled up an animation that Angela had made. "Someone stabbed Gideon with the syringe found at the crime scene, but never actually pushed the substance into his system. My guess is, if we get a hold of the clothes the killer was wearing, it would have the same amount of opiate particulates as it did the victim's clothes."

"The killer may have been distracted right before he was to plug him with opiates. Good work, Dr. Hodgins," she responded now with full attention.

"Oh, that's not all. Back to your theory of the gradual maitotoxin, I found seven restaurants that are likely to have the dinoflagellates in the kitchen based on their seafood imports. I sent them to the suits," he said before walking out.

* * *

"I know who did it," Booth said as he crossed his arms and leaned back on the seat at the diner.

"Your gut told you that?" Brenna asked.

"Yes," he sighed and drank his coffee. "Jaret Fields."

"Gideon's boss? Which victim?"

"I'm not sure, but he killed one of them. Sweets built a profile and said he was completely capable given the limits."

"He doesn't have motive though," Brennan said as she sipped the soup. She had not eaten in awhile. Sweets was correct but he does not need to know that.

"But he doesn't have an alibi," Booth said as Brennan nodded. His phone rang and he put it on speaker as Aubrey spoke.

"I went through the restaurants that Hodgins listed and only one of them Gideon frequented. And, get this, he's eaten there every other Friday for the past two years with his girlfriend."

"Ugh," Booth wiped his face with his hands.

"Hunches are not facts. I have said that plenty before," Brennan said with a little victory in her voice.

"No I'm not upset about that," Booth crossed his arms on the table. "She's extremely emotional and I can't stand bringing her back to the interrogation room again."

Brennan reached across and put a hand on his arm, a gesture of reassurance. "Hey, it's okay. You can bring her into a conference room instead. Or Aubrey and I can do it if you don't feel comfortable."

Booth shook his head, "Nope, I've got this. Thanks, Bones." He got up and kissed her on the head before heading out. A second of tension overtook Brennan's body. She sighed and played with her soup. She could not eat anymore. What is wrong with the damn world? It's slower than usual.

Same interrogation, same outcome: a dismayed woman sobbing in grief. "It really doesn't add up," Booth said as he walked out of the interrogation room with Sweets. "The only motive she has with killing Gideon would be his money. Except, they're not married and she wouldn't inherit a single cent."

"Killing him after the wedding would make more sense if that was what she was after," Sweets continued.

Booth nodded until Aubrey ran up to them with a pile. "I still haven't found to whom the seven thousand was for but I found the what," he flipped through a page as they made their way to the conference room. "It's for drugs. Heroin. Owens was a dealer and the seven thousand began accumulating in the past six months. Gideon owed him a ton of money but he couldn't pay for it."

"Still doesn't make sense. The guy was rich, regular dealers would threaten first before actually killing the person," Booth sighed as he sat in a chair.

"Perhaps, he wasn't giving him heroin. It was probably something else," Sweets said, taking a seat opposite Booth. "Drugs is a really good cover up for what Owens was actually giving Gideon."

"But what?" Aubrey asked.

He shrugged, "I'll look into it."

Booth played with the edge of a paper. "Can you send me the restaurant's surveillance for the past year?"

"They don't have one," Aubrey replied. "It's an independent restaurant. It's small and their budget isn't high so they haven't invested in one. I did, however, look at security tapes from street lights because the place is located on a corner street, so, I've got a view from two cameras."

"Alright, but there's no surveillance in the back of the building?"

"Nada," Aubrey said as he walked out, "I'll get them to you as soon as possible."

It was seven hours later when he walked back in the Jeffersonian, the bureau had absolutely nothing on this guy so maybe they did. "Hey, Booth, look what I found," Angela met him at the doors.

"So, I've been rummaging through the tapes for the past year and every other Friday, it's Gideon and his fiancee," she said as she pressed things on a tablet. "So, I started paying more attention to other nights, and five months ago, we see Gideon," she zoomed into a man opening the door of the restaurant, a woman trailing him. "But not with Layla. She's brunette, but this woman is blonde."

He sighed. "If that's what I think it is, I guess we have our motive," Booth said pulling out his phone to dial Aubrey.

* * *

"Jemma Weiss," Booth said as he threw the papers on the interrogation table, taking a seat across the woman. You're Layla's older sister?"

Aubrey set his tie and sat next to Booth. "Yes. Is Layla, okay?" The woman had her arms crossed and leaned back on the chair.

"She's nervous, Booth," Sweets said into his earpiece, watching the whole interrogation on the other side of the one-way mirror.

"Nope, not really," Aubrey said as he dug a picture out of the file. "Can you tell us your relationship with Gideon Caster?" He slipped the picture to her sight.

"He was supposed to be my brother-in-law," she said sadly. "I heard what happened."

"I'm sure you did. I'm sure you knew about it," Booth said as he folded his hand on the table. "Apparently, you had a relationship with Gideon four years ago. You guys were serious weren't you?"

She was silent for a second, thinking. "Are–are you accusing me of something?"

"I don't know. It seems unlikely for you to just meet him out of nowhere, especially the restaurant where he and his fiancee frequented," Aubry responded.

"I think I know what happened. I think, you were sleeping with Gideon, then out of nowhere, he wanted to break it off with you because he was taking a new step with Layla. You got mad. Really, _really_ mad," Booth took over.

The woman snickered. "You've got it all wrong."

"It seems awfully convenient for you. Very timely."

She sighed. "It was months before Gideon proposed. We hadn't talked in a while but he called me up one day asking to meet him there. We had already resolved our problems from the past and," she took a breath. "And he wanted my blessing. He didn't want it to hurt me. He was just…warning me, I guess; making sure that I was okay with it. And I was. He told me over dinner. It's not like I didn't see it coming. They'd been together for two years.

People, you know, who have been together for that long of a time, you just know; people who spend every waking moment together or thinking of each other. Those kinds of people, those partners, they're meant to be. Even the dumbest could see. I understood that she was the one for him, I'm not an idiot."

Booth leaned back on the seat, biting the inside of his cheek.

"Whatcha think, Sweets?" Booth met him inside the private room by the interrogation room.

"She's hiding something," Sweets replied as they walked out and headed to Booth's office. "She has an alibi, though, but I don't feel right about it."

"Well, we'll check on that, but what did you actually think? You think she's capable of it?"

"Given the chance, yes, she's definitely able."

Booth groaned in frustration at his response. "Sweets you say that every time! 'Given the chance.'" He spoke the latter with air quotes.

He sighed, "It's true, Agent Booth. She shifted a lot in her chair. She knows something we don't. She may be uncomfortable but she fought the urges to remain closed-off. It's like–" he paused to think of the words. "It's like she's fighting the signals of looking guilty. She would try to lean forward because she understood that leaning back means she's trying to distance herself from you. She kept her arms on the table because having them under it makes it look like she's hiding. To an untrained eye, she doesn't look guilty at all.

Except, I'm an exceptional psychologist, Agent Booth. She knows the signals of guilt like she read about it somewhere, and did her best to manipulate her way around it. That's something someone on the verge of sociopathy would do."

Booth rejoiced, "There ya go, Sweets! That's what I'm looking for. Analysis!"

"I write my analyses on my reports for every suspect. I mean you should know, you read them." Booth cowered a little bit. "Agent Booth, you do read them–right?"

"I…I skim through them."

Dr. Sweets shook his head in defeat and defended. "Agent Booth! Those are essential to the case!"

"Yes and also my gut. The gut is much easier to comprehend. Your psychobabble term stuff gets more advanced in every report, Sweets."

"You know," Sweets began with a sigh. "You're just like Dr. Brennan."

"I don't know what that means," he joked half-heartedly.

"No matter how much you deny it, you spend so much time with her that you're starting to believe that psychology isn't real."

"Aw, come on, Sweets!" The psychologist was halfway out the door. "Just shorten them next time!"

Psychology is a real science, he knew that. Psychology told him that he is in love with Hannah.

Just like it told him that he was in love with Bones. Just like it told him exactly _how_ to get over Bones.

It works.


	9. Michelangelo's David

**Disclaimer:** I wish I owned Bones.

* * *

Hodgins and Brennan stood next to Angela in front of the Angelatron. It had been a week since the case first opened and the entire Jeffersonian met at an impasse. Their need to find answers consequently resulted in them three spending the night at the Jeffersonian. No new evidence and no new findings in the bones of either victim got them all stuck.

Except Angela, of course.

"I did my best retrieving phone records and there was nothing unusual from the looks of it, but," she did a number of things that resulted in zeros and ones popping up on the screen. "The last call he made was seven minutes long and from a Texas area code."

"Gideon's boss visited Texas, but he met with him back at the restaurant," Hodgins said.

Angela pulled up a video she had captured from one of the traffic camera videos, "and he was telling the truth. They walked into the restaurant together and it looks like they convoyed on the way there. The direction they came from looks to be the the fracking plant."

"He could have bought a phone there or something," Hodgins reasoned.

"Although I am not dismissing that thought, it does not make much sense to me," Brennan responded, her arms crossing over her chest and staring at the looping video of Jaret Fields and Gideon walking in the restaurant. "It seems like everything comes attached to that eatery, though. Booth and I will check it out and see if we have anymore new information for you." They nodded as she left.

Brennan actively knocked on the door. It has been five minutes.

Booth leaned on the door after opening it. Brennan forced her eyesight to his despite the impending impulse to trail her vision over his gray sweatpants and bare torso. His face did not help her either. His hair went in all directions and his eyes were barely open.

There were only two things that captivated her. One, she had made clear, was immaculate intelligence. The other was innocent pandemonium, the kind of chaos that was up to the universe to yield, the production of things dependent upon chance. They were things like messy hair in the morning or the unfinished buttoning of a shirt or an unkept scruff. The physical brouhaha that Booth was passively exhibiting slowed down her world. Again.

The way he was leaning on the door with his eyes half-closed, and a sliver of the black of his boxers waistband present because his sweats were an inch off position, raised all her thoughts. Innocent pandemonium, it was.

She only saw his pants in her periphery, though, determined to keep her eyes fixated on his orbitals. His abdominals and the indentations that divided them in six separations, his pectorals acting as a bed to the hanging religious medal around his neck, his arms and the architecture that they were built upon in an effort to accustom the muscle groups from constant wear and tear, each of them drove all the rationality out of her brain. He shivered slightly, his bare skin exposed to the free-flowing air that originated from the open windows. In an effort to sublimate the chill, Brennan saw his oblique contract and the hand from the arm that was hidden behind the door found its way to the other, caressing its tricep and hoping to find some friction.

"Good morning, Bones," his voice was raspy. _Innocent pandemonium_. He left the door open and walked away as an invite. She stared intently at his back, his acromia nearly perfectly leveled in measurement. It makes sense, his shoulders were associated with his good posture, which dignified his confidence. His back, however, was another sight to behold. The muscle group that was upon the scapula, the trapezius, stretched with every step he took. The connecting muscles from his obliques also contracted. Brennan did not get to examining his gluteus because he had turned and was in the motion of putting on a white shirt. (She does not know if she felt relieved or unhappy with the disruption.) The fabric stretched in all directions and she had a full glimpse of his torso before it was buried underneath. Booth was beyond comparable to Michelangelo's David.

She could not breathe. It was the somatoform thing again. "What are you doing here at-" he looked at the clock on the oven, "-seven in the morning?" He grabbed a glass from the cupboard. She thought about it and she actually had absolutely no reason to be here. There was no urgent need to head over to the restaurant now. She felt it was just the sleep deprivation that made her think she needed to get here and get him and leave the city to go do FBI things. It was irrational. But she dug herself a hole and now she had to make up an excuse. "You know what? Never mind. I'll just make breakfast and you can tell me about why you didn't sleep."

Sirens went off in her head. How did he know? "How do you know I didn't sleep last night?"

"I have eyes," he saw her confusion.

"Yes, statistically most humans are born with two."

He laughed, grabbing two eggs. "I mean," he put oil in a skillet. "Your eyes are swollen, your hair is-" he pointed at her hair with a fork and waved it around in a motion that suggested that it was all over the place. "-it's everywhere. Also, you're wearing the same clothes as yesterday. And every bone in your body cracked when you sat down. You've been sitting on your desk writing your book, right?"

"If I cracked every bone in my body I would be unable to move because of seething pain, Booth." Brennan was amazed. Was he always that observant? Well, she was _just_ staring at his bare chest and naming every single muscle that protruded (she had to name almost the whole system with his incredible definition) and she may have noticed anomalies like how his left set of abs was shifted just millimeters lower than the right. Innocent pandemonium. He had three moles on his oblique that trailed diagonally beginning from his anterior and down inches above his gluteus in the posterior. They were different sizes but equidistant from each other. He had Orion's Belt on his body. Of course, not literally, it is impossible to possess stars, they are ginormous beyond comprehension. But still, he had a constellation on his body. She would never have gone to that conclusion. It was illogical. It was just a pattern. Statistically, it was possible. She was observant by nature, but Booth was more inattentive when it came to behaviors that were insignificant or abstract.

Almost every aspect of his assumption was correct except for the "writing your book" part. She tried, but she only managed to type "Chapter Seven", and that was it. For the rest of the night, she sat and stared at it.

"Sorry, Bones. I meant your joints cracked," he smiled at her as he corrected himself. He was slicing potatoes.

"Oh, yes. It's the gases present in your synovial fluid. The gases build up in bubbles and they pop," she said as she leaned on the island to watch him cook.

"Or," he placed the potatoes in the skillet and began chopping spinach. "It's the tendons and ligaments when they're tightened or have moved around a joint. The crack comes from them repositioning themselves."

Brennan raised her eyebrows and nodded her head in understanding, surprised that he knew that. "That is correct."

He laughed a little. "You're confused because you don't think I would have known that."

"Yes, I am a little amused that you had that knowledge." She took a piece of spinach and ate it.

"I was a serious athlete at one point in my life, Bones. I know a lot more about the human body than you give me credit for," he said, swatting her hand away as she tried to grab another green.

"Oh, really? Like what? Beyond common knowledge, and not the muscle groups because men like you should be aware of that."

"What does that mean?"

"I mean, men who are clearly defined and understand how to manipulate the muscular system to build." She saw his cheek tint. It was probably from the cold.

"Do bones count?" He set aside chopped bacon in a smaller container and spread shredded cheese on the skillet before cracking two eggs on top.

"No, I've taught you them," she grabbed a piece of cheese that fell on the countertop.

"Okay, well, the endocrine system is in charge of glands," he said as he put the skillet in the oven and turned it on before heading to the coffee maker. "Salivary glands are excreted in your mouth, obviously."

"No, that is incorrect," she said straightly.

"What? It's a gland."

"But that would be an exocrine gland, not endocrine. Endocrine is released into the bloodstream when exocrine is through ducts. For example, mammary glands are for lactation when a woman has a baby."

He sighed, "Okay well, your pituitary's in the brain." He listed more, only stopping when the coffee finished. "And lastly," he said as he filled up two cups. "The human favorite," he took a seat on the stool next to her. "The reproductive organs."

"I feel that that is an overgeneralization," she said before putting creamer in the mug.

"Come on, Bones. Name one person who doesn't want to be stimulated ' _there_ '." She raised a brow at the emphasis.

"I mean, you're not actually being stimulated in the ovaries or testes, Booth. The genital system is in charge of that," he crinkled his nose.

"I suddenly don't like this conversation. It reminds me of sex-ed with Mrs. Terry. The only difference is that you're hot and she was fifty." The oven rang and Booth went over to grab the skillet, suddenly forgetting what he had just said.

She stiffened. In the past six years, she had grown to understand the "hot" colloquialism. Even if she had not, she did not literally look hot at the moment because the window was still open and she had taken off her jacket. She would have made the distinction, anyway, whether it was six years ago or tomorrow. Booth probably certainly meant that she was attractive.

The world spun slow.

"Eat," he said with a smile as he set the skillet down in front of her and grabbed two forks. He sat next to her again to share in the dish.

Brennan acted like nothing had happened. "Booth!" She yelled every time a piece of bacon made it to her side of the skillet.

"Sorry, sorry," he said with a laugh. "It's hard to share a plate with a vegetarian."

They ate in silence for awhile, but she broke it. "By the way, where's Hannah?"

He sighed in clear sadness. "She's in New York. She's running a story on some political campaign so she needs to camp out and interview people for the next couple of days."

She nodded and went back to eating. It was nice, just the two of them. No Sweets, no Aubrey, no Hannah. For awhile it was just them ruling the crimes until the FBI made them go to therapy and introduced a new agent. Brennan blamed the bureau for everything, nowadays. She loved those two boys, no doubt, but sometimes it was just easier to think of herself and Booth and how they would go to suspects' houses together. How they would eat at the diner alone together. How they would interrogate people together. Now he splits his activities with Brennan and Aubrey on field work. She constantly found herself needing to rely on Sweets a little bit more, and she hated that thought. She does not rely on anyone but herself.

And then they split up and she went to the Indonesian Archipelagos and he went back to Afghanistan. Logically, she cannot blame the FBI for Hannah. She did not know who to accuse, though. It certainly was not her. Maybe it was Booth.

But Hannah was not to be attributed negatively. Booth loves her, and he regrets absolutely nothing. No one was to blame when there is nothing to blame anyone for. She was a blessing to him, so really, he blamed God. He is responsible and that just made it all the more sweet to him.

Maybe Brennan can blame herself. She left him just as much as he left her.

* * *

"Dead end," Booth sighed as he plopped on the chair in front of Brennan's desk. "The call came from a stolen phone. The owner was a Texas native who was visiting family over the summer."

She sighed in disappointment, "We have nothing, either. I've gone over both sets of bones and I have found nothing more to give you now than I did the first time I looked at them."

Booth stared at her intently. They had breakfast together three hours ago, and in that period, she still had not found rest. "Okay, you know what you're going to do? You're gonna lay on that couch and sleep."

"Booth, it's not necessary at the moment."

"Anything that can compromise your well-being from a physical and biological standpoint is considered necessary," he spoke as "sciencey" as he could. Maybe it will work.

"I have a lot of work to do," she said, looking at a blank screen. The computer was shut right in front of her, Booth having stood up and slamming the laptop closed.

"No, you don't." He was getting upset.

"Look, Booth, I can take care of myself. I don't need help. You know how much it irritates me when someone tells me what to do."

"I don't care about the consequence right now. Just feel better, please." He looked at her with apprehension.

She smiled, "When have I not?"

Brennan always made sure to feel better. It has been a week since their engagement and she has never felt better.

She was still nauseous sometimes, though. And maybe the world was still a little too slow.

But she was better. Temperance was sure of it.


	10. Perfect Success Rate

**Disclaimer:** The only thing I own about Bones is the Netflix views I've generated on my phone.

* * *

Hannah comes back today. That was probably why Booth walked in the lab with a bunch of coffee for everyone. There was no place he hated more than the Jeffersonian, but it sure did not seem so the way his face was looking. Christmas tree, indeed.

"You're skipping again," Hodgins said as he walked out of his bug and slime and plant room. He was met with a cup of coffee at the entrance.

"How's the best entomologist in the world?" Booth's smile reached his ears.

"Also, best botanist and mineralogist. And I'm very well, thank you," Hodgins laughed at the man. "What happened to the actual Booth?"

The agent rolled his eyes and walked into the autopsy room. "Oh, how I love the smell of liver," he said with disgust, though his demeanor still jubilant.

Camille turned and let out a laugh. "Good morning, Seeley." He set a cup on her desk with a wide smile and stood there like a dog waiting for a treat. "What's gotten into you?"

"My lovely girlfriend–" he cleared his throat. "Excuse me, _fiancee_ , actually, is coming home."

Cam almost spat out her coffee. "Fiancee? What?"

"Yes, I haven't said anything to anyone except Bones so you can't say anything." He smiled.

She stared at him, her eyes blinking as if trying to comprehend the situation before her. "And Hannah said yes?"

"Of course she said yes! I love that woman," he was so overjoyed he could collapse.

"And you've told Dr. Brennan?" He nodded. "And she's…and nothing's changed or anything?"

"What do you mean? She supports it as much as any anthropologist would. She still spits out cultural crap about it, but nothing out of the ordinary." Booth was halfway out of the office. "I'm tellin' ya, she's gonna be the best best man ever."

Cam saw him walk out, awestruck at the news. Seeley Booth getting married to anyone that was not Dr. Brennan cost her money on the Jeffersonian pool. Actually, it cost the whole Jeffersonian staff. It had been going on for the past two years and there were only two people who could win now, Dr. Wells and Dr. Edison. Edison bet she would marry someone else.

And Wells, well, he bet she would marry _him_ when she gets around to it. Cam cringed at the thought.

The Jeffersonian housed the most rational people in the world. Even they felt the universe meant for them to be together.

Ten days this case had begun. And they were ten damned days. Brennan had found new injuries on Gideon, thank the Universe. But they still left her flabbergasted.

"These carpal bones," she aimed the camera on the left set of hand bones. "The pisiform and trapezium. They have these anomalies on them that could only be consistent with constant rubbing," she sighed. "These on the right hamate and scaphoid have similar wear, too. They're all antemortem."

"Something tells me that these two injuries were caused by the same thing," Jessica analyzed. New week, new intern.

"I concur. The similarity is too significant for them to have been generated separately." Brennan looked them over again. "And these–" she showed the intern the bone. "The bases of carpals one and five." She looked at them in thought, but her change in emotion, one that dazzled Jessica Warren every time, showed that she had figured it out. Warren was always amused by it.

"Zip ties." She said as the redhead grew confused. "These markings and the micro-fractures are from zip ties. Look. The measurement of chafing on the bone is consistent with regularly mass-produced steggel ties. It was tightened around here, just above the ulna and radius and he tried to free himself from them. He loosened them somehow, but not enough to get free, so it moved upwards the hand, just underneath the metacarpals and he continued to struggle. The victim was bound."

"Amazing," Jessica whispered as Brennan handed her the bone.

"Indeed," she smiled. "Catalog these and I'll go tell Booth." The doctor slipped her gloves off her hands, almost bumping into a man with a tray of cups.

"Bones!" He enthused. She kept walking, though.

"Hi, Booth, I found these fractures on Gideon's bones. He was bound with zip ties approximately a week before he died. I'm checking in with Dr. Saroyan," Brennan walked fast.

"Alright, but before you go, have some coffee," he flashed a charming smile, one she could not decline.

"Your emotional stability is beyond your norm," she sipped the java as he laughed. "Anything interesting you wanna tell me about?"

"Hannah's coming home, that's all," he was taking steps backwards, encouraging Brennan to continue with the errand to Cam while he darted to her office to wait.

She smiled slightly and nodded. She should have seen it coming, and in essence, she did. It was only rational. She just did not know how much it would affect her, how happy he was with Hannah. Despite that, she felt she mirrored his emotions. Brennan was overjoyed. She loved seeing him like that. His aura was less sardonic and more friendly, less cynical and more altruistic, even. It was a beautiful thing to see.

"Were there any disfigurement on the victim's wrists when you were examining him?" Brennan asked Cam who was typing away at her computer.

"I don't remember seeing any, on either victim." She pulled up a file on both Gideon Caster and Owens.

"There would have been minimal scarring since bindings like those would cause some significant damage," Brennan looked at the pictures and practically took over Cam's computer.

"What's going on? Did you find something new on the bones?"

"Yes, I did." She turned to make eye contact with the other doctor. "The victim's hands were tied together with Panduit strap."

"Zip ties?"

"Precisely. They obviously would not have left particles on the bone, but the victim struggled through them immensely. He would have sustained some sort of blemish on the skin," she was looking at every angle of the victim's wrists through the pictures. "Look, there." She pointed at the screen and enlarged the photo. "There is a faint mark aligned with the position of the pisiform. No one would have noticed that it was anything different from the regular edemas natural to a decomposing body."

"Nice work, Dr. Brennan," Cam said as she saved the picture for evidence.

"I do not remember a time in the Jeffersonian during my tenure when I have produced anything less extraordinary than my usual breakthroughs. Though, thank you, I know that you meant that as a compliment." Camille just shook her head. Brennan's response was expected.

She stopped her before she left. "Hey, Dr. Brennan?" Temperance turned. "Booth told me."

"Booth told you about what?" Her arms found their way on her chest, crossing.

"About Hannah."

"Oh, yes, I heard that she is returning from a weekend in New York."

"No, I meant," the pathologist took a breath. "The engagement."

Brennan did not make an attempt to move or shift, staying casual. Camille was no idiot, though. She saw the nature of her body language, it was of distress and affliction. "I had already known. I thought that it was public knowledge."

"Nope. He's only told us both."

"And Sweets."

"He told Sweets?" Cam thought he would be the last to know. Booth hates how much of a therapist he becomes every time he bore transformative news.

"No, I told Sweets." Brennan let her arms down while the other raised her brows in confusion. "I thought that—considering that he was our psychologist—it was only fair to let him know anytime anything changed in our dynamic."

"I would think that nothing changed."

"That is a correct assumption. I just meant that whenever life-changing appears to have grown in either of our lives that could affect the working and professional relationship we have, that's all."

Cam nodded to placate her, making her walk out feeling that the conversation had terminated. She was no psychologist, but she knew the signs of consternation no matter how solitary and closed-off the person was. Someone even as personally-kept as Dr. relationship was code forintimate partnership.

* * *

"I went through the background checks and found this," Aubrey said, handing Booth a folder. "We said Owens was a middleman."

Booth went through the papers, not surprised. "Jared Fields."

"Yep. But here's the kicker," he pointed at something on the paper. "He runs an underground heroin business."

Booth snickered. "What is a man who earns two-hundred K a year doing side jobs to make extra money?"

"I mean, you said it. More money."

"Yeah, well he's an idiot." Booth made a call to get the man in the interrogation room.

"What am I doing here? I told you guys everything," Fields leaned on the back of the uncomfortable chair.

"Not everything," Booth said as he slid a paper of financials in front of the man. "It says here you get about ten thousand in revenue a week. Wanna tell us what that's about?"

"I make some more money doing outside business, that's all." He grew nervous.

"Is that your final answer?" Aubrey said as he fixed his tie.

Jaret looked to the ground, thinking about what to say next.

"Because if that really is some outside business, I want in." Booth joked as the suspect grew even more uncomfortable. Booth grew serious and intently focused on his demeanor. "Look, we don't give a crap about you being a druglord, okay? We do give a crap about the fact that you killed Gideon, that's all."

"I didn't kill him," Fields said, clearly distressed about the accusation.

"You know what I'm thinking? He was gonna turn you in. He was gonna tell that Texas field about you and your drugs."

"Okay, but why would he do that?! He would want me to get that job because he was getting a promotion!"

"Maybe he blackmailed you for that promotion," Aubrey said as he leaned forward on the table.

"No, he did not. He is very capable and very good at his job."

"Or maybe you picked him because he was good business," Booth said as Fields cowered in his seat. "We know he was buying from you. We also know he owed you. You got angry and ya killed him."

"Look, I didn't kill Gideon, okay?! He and I had a good relationship. He came to work on time every day, even filled in for some of the other workers over vacations and holidays. He was a good man." He said the latter with utmost certainty.

"He may have been a good man, but he was an addict."

"No," he sighed. "He didn't owe me money for that."

"Then what was it for?"

"We were good friends. Best friends, even. He needed them for a vacation with his fiancee."

"Damn, you must be an amazing friend," Booth joked again but kept his face serious.

"I just took them out of his pay," Fields said shamefully.

"That, my friend, is illegal. Company money and your money are two different things," Aubrey said straightly. "You want us to get you for murder, illegal distribution, _and_ embezzlement? That's a hell of a rap sheet."

"I owed him my life," he said whole-heartedly. "The man saved my life. The least I could do was give him the money. I couldn't take it out of my own because I'm not the only one running the heroin, okay? The rest would see if the finances were off by even a dollar."

"So you're telling me, you're willing to steal company money for the guy?"

"Yes, I am. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. He took a bullet for me, literally. That was the least I could do." He strained away from eye contact. "I owed a lot of people a ton of money. I would've gladly taken money out of my pay, but I got three kids in college and the rest of my debts to take care of. That's why I need the side business." He sighed. "All he wanted was a damn vacation and I was okay with that. The man was a brother to me."

"He took a bullet for you? Someone wanted you dead?" Booth asked, suddenly twenty times more interested.

"It was four years ago. Some psychopathic environmentalist started firing shots at the offices. Gideon and I were discussing stuff when the man came running in and Gideon shoved me out of the way."

"Can you give us a name?"

"I don't know what good that'll do you. He's dead."

"Didya kill him?" Aubrey asked.

"Man, no. Look, I haven't killed a soul. Gideon got hit on the hip and he couldn't get up so the guy thought he was dead. The idiot also thought he was the head of admin so he felt accomplished having killed him and shot himself in the head." Fields sighed and sat back in the chair.

They walked out of the interrogation room, Booth sighing and Aubrey probably going hungry. "I still think he did it," Booth said.

"You gotta stop listening to your gut and start listening to Dr. Brennan. We don't even have evidence that puts him near Gideon when he died."

Booth and Aubrey walked through the halls to get to Booth's office. "You listen to your gut. It tells you you're hungry all the time."

Aubrey snickered. "I listen to an actual gut, Agent Booth. You listen to a feeling." He said before leaving.

Booth listened to his gut all the time. Temperance did not know that he failed once. To her knowledge, his gut had a perfect success rate.

Nearly a year ago, his gut told him Brennan was in love with him. It failed him.


	11. Fifteen Again

**Disclaimer:** Nope.

* * *

She was still on chapter seven of her book and it drove all the energy out of the woman. Temperance had not slept. She had not talked to a soul in the past five hours. Hannah's flight should have landed two hours ago, according to Booth. Also, according to the _lack_ of Booth, Brennan figured that it had landed safely and they were back in his apartment doing stuff she knew couples who have been separated would be doing once they were together again. Anthropologically, it was perfectly healthy. For them, at least.

Brennan was a whole different story. Her immune system was working overtime trying to compensate for all the stress her body was going through. The case was acting endless like it was missing a finish line or an endgame. Her book usually wrote itself, but it seemed like she does not even know English with the pace it was going. And then there was Booth. And Hannah.

They should not cause her stress but they do.

She does not know why though. The only thing going right at the moment was the fact that Brennan felt happy because Booth was happy. So it baffled her how they caused her so much instability. She loves Booth, he was an anchor for her throughout all these years. He managed to get her out of so many life-and-death things like Kenton and buried cars and crazy doctors. The man got her out of little stuff, too, from shooting suspects to getting trapped in some voodoo crap down in New Orleans. She needed him more than she had initially felt.

The Jeffersonian was world-renowned and a palace of intellectual renaissance, sought by nomadic scholars through the ends of all continents. It was not because the building looked nice or the gardens were beautiful, it was because of people like her. The FBI asking for her and the rest of the team's help was no surprise. She had immediately substantiated a judgment upon their partnership, feeling that the bureau does ten percent of criminal-catching and the Jeffersonian does the remaining ninety-percent of vital investigating (although, her statistical analyses were not empirically-derived and she had not taken all the necessary variables to account for the actuality of their contributions to the partnership's solve rate, but she had come to understand that exaggeration was a norm in social standing and had grown to actually participating in her own forms of hyperbole). It made sense. The team was practical in the way they solved their problems. They used science. Agents like Booth relied on intuition and that could only get them so far. It was only logical to believe that most of the weight-lifting was done by the scientists.

But then, maybe Sweets was correct. Brennan can see just how vital Booth was in the arrangement. It was rare for him to be wrong about his feelings. It was not rational to believe that his "gut" intrinsically knows who committed a crime or how. Relying on visceral measurements was just an intricate form of guesswork. It was nothing more than mere speculation. But Brennan had grown to believe that Booth was more than that. He understood the complexities of human interaction. He knows how to interrogate and can grasp emotional responses. He intimidates those who need to be. Booth can console and empathize beyond what Brennan can comprehend—and she can comprehend the most abstract physical and chemical equations, so to her, it was astonishing to see the work he can do. Sometimes she wishes to be like that. She had extensive knowledge on how primates interact and she understood the evolutionary concepts, but she never practiced.

Science did not teach her to practice that.

But then Booth came along and taught her. So, yes, to a minimal extent, Sweets was correct. The gut is imperative. Instinct was vital. She would be willing to concede that the bureau did forty percent and her team did sixty. People like Booth are paramount. It was illogical to think so without evidence that his intestines are capable of thought, but his intuition was necessary in any case.

It was not rational, but Sweets said she was a little less empirical now than she was six years ago. She might actually believe him. Temperance really does need Booth more than she thought.

It alarmed her; the thought that she needed a person. The last time that happened, they walked out on her, all three of them. Mom, dad, and Russ were the only people she felt she needed. They were necessary to her life. And then they left and she survived. They were not as important as she thought. She grew independent, working night and day doing something she loves with all her brain. Brennan published books and solved crimes. She is famous, she is a millionaire. So, no, family was not something she needed. She was capable of doing everything on her own.

Temperance does not need anyone.

But she needs Booth. She looked into her future and how melancholy it would be without him in it. He taught her things she thought she already knew. He taught her the fact that life was so much better with someone by her side, willing to protect her to all extents of life itself, people who are willing to defend her and die for her. Booth would die for her. The thought somehow made her smile. Of course, she does not want him to get killed at her expense. It was just the whole idea of it. He also taught her about emotions and empathy and living widely. He taught her that, sometimes, living a little outside of the rules was okay and essential to life. She dined-and-dashed with him once, it was awesome. It was illegal but awesome. It was also irrational, to do the deed and to have fun doing it. All aspects of it were unreasonable and ridiculous. But to feel that? She got high on learning organic chemistry. She found joy in examining bones. But damn, to feel that? It was like she was fifteen again, with mom, dad, and Russ. It was like when her brother spoke "Marco" and she responded "Polo". It was like mom and swimming with dolphins. It was like seeing dad teach science. Booth was a reminder of everything happy in her past life. Being with Booth was like living her childhood. How he knows that her second favorite flowers are daisies and her favorite planet is Jupiter. How he knows she hates being doubted. How he knows she hates not finding answers. He knows that she likes to be alone sometimes. He knows exactly _when_ she wants to be alone so in times that she does not, he is there. He knows she loves Chinese food in the middle of the night. He knows she likes it when he visits at odd hours in the night because he can tell she is awake from seeing the lights in her apartment down the road. And most importantly, Booth knows she can take care of herself, willing to let her fight her own battles. When she broke serial killer Howard Epps' wrist or when she threw down a gang leader in the halls of the FBI, he protected her as much as he could but gave her the green light to kick ass whenever she wanted to and left her alone to do it (though he did threaten that Mara Muerte racketeer with the barrel of a gun in his mouth because he put a bounty on her, but Brennan does not know that).

Being with Booth gave her something that no one in her life ever did or ever will. He gave her back the enjoyment in life she had not experienced in twenty years. Irrational? Definitely. There was no hard science behind it. There was soft psychological science, though, and she felt uncertain like any scientist would, but it was the only conclusion she had for now.

She met with him the next day. "If I do not get this to my publisher in the next three weeks, they could revoke my contract," Brennan said as she sat on their usual diner table, her eyes facing the table as she wrote.

Booth sat across, chewing on fries. "I doubt it."

Brennan had taken a new approach to the writing. She had a paper, a pen, and her brain. She was going to write chapter seven longhand. "Did your gut tell you that?"

"Nope." He said with complete certainty. She sighed and looked up at him, his eyes already on her. "I know it because they would be stupid to let you go. You have gotten them thousands of dollars in revenue."

She smiled slightly. "Millions."

"What?" He ate another fry.

"Millions of dollars, not thousands," Brennan said in a sheepish and appreciative tone.

It just got him to smile even wider. "See what I mean? Look, Bones, I read your books the moment they hit the stores. I'm an expert in them. It doesn't matter if I believe I'm in them or if you say I'm not, they are amazing and captivating and have brought a new understanding of anthropology to everyone who reads them. You have inspired countless, Temperance." Booth said the latter with a fry pointed at her.

The use of her first name caught her attention, solidifying the sincerity of Booth's monologue. "Thank you, Booth." She looked back at the paper. It had lines upon lines of sentences, but every single one was scratched over. She had no creative inspiration at the moment. "But I don't understand why I am unable to form any sort of coherent narrative."

"Come on, you're you."

"I don't know what that means." He laughed at that.

"It means you're a genius and the words will come. They always do. Just like answers. The answers _always_ come to you." He said intimately, causing her to smile an even greater deal than she had. He returned to his old, immature self though. "Hey, can you write some badass scene for Agent Andy where he jumps over a moving car and tackles the suspect or something?"

"No, Booth, I am not doing that."

"Hey, I'm giving you ideas. Be grateful."

"Well, thank you. But I would have to find the physics of your ability to jump over a moving car. Despite your amazing physique, I highly doubt you are capable."

It appears that Booth did not catch the compliment about his body, fixated on the concept of the fictional agent in Brennan's book. "So, are you admitting that I'm Agent Andy?" He smirked.

She shook her head. "I am doing nothing of the sort. Agent Andy has the same stature as you, that is all."

He nodded to appease. "Sure, Bones." His phone rang and for a moment, she thought that the case had gone somewhere, but the caller was someone she should have already suspected. "Hey, babe."

She felt she was eavesdropping on a conversation. At the same time, she had resentment. Hannah had interrupted whatever was happening here. It had been awhile since it was just Booth and Bones. Brennan did not like that a phone call could separate him from her so quickly.

He looked at his watch. "Well, I'm having lunch with Bones right now, so maybe in thirty minutes?" A feeling rose up in her throat, one she should not be feeling. "Oh okay, well then I'll head over there right now and we can go over the details...okay, bye...I love you, too." The feeling in her throat changed from something good to something bad in those ten seconds he had spoken. "I gotta go, Bones. We're holding a get-together after the wedding ceremony and Hannah's in the middle of meeting with the cake director person for all the information." He stood from the chair.

"Baker, Booth. Not cake director person."

"Same thing. Will you be okay here?" He put his hand on her shoulder, sending a message to her spine that made her flutter.

"Uhm, yes, definitely. Maybe if I get some alone time, I'll be able to finish my writing."

"Okay, well, call me if you need anything or if you get over that writing gridlock, okay?"

She nodded as he walked out. She did not watch him leave, it was not a sight she wanted to see. He was not abandoning her, she understood that. But their separation gave her more affliction than she let on. Booth was two months away from being severed from her forever. It made her uneasy and nauseous. It made her world spin as if a sloth were turning it. Everything was different, now. She could not eat, write, or even think. She missed so many things on bones that even her interns felt she was unlike herself.

She did not write a word of chapter seven that day.


	12. Shakespearean Play

**Disclaimer:** I wish, sometimes, that if you love something enough you'll own it. Still not the case because I don't own Bones.

* * *

"Iknowwhathappened. Iknowwhathappened." Jessica Warren said as she walked out of the bone room and into Cam's office. Brennan and Cam were in the middle of a conversation when she interrupted. They stopped and stared at the redhead. "I'm so sorry."

"Can you tell us what you know happened, Ms. Warren?" Brennan said sternly.

"Okay, well, the fracture on Owens' tibial tuberosity? It was from a kick. I read on Daisy's report that he was hit with a spherical object and she was correct. Except, the spherical object was the heel of someone's foot. According to the indentation, the victim was kicked on the side of his knee. It penetrated outward, causing the assailant's calcaneus to hit near his patella. There is a scratch on the lateral condyles of the femur and tibia that indicates the knee was almost dislocated from the impact. The two bones slid on each other like a tectonic plate. And I ran through the measurements; they're consistent with a men's size eleven."

"The assailant would have been barefoot," Brennan said as she looked over at Cam. "What are the longitudinal dimensions of Gideon's foot?"

She went through files and folders before finding the victims specifications. "27.6 centimeters." She sighed and looked at the doctor. "That's a size eleven."

"All the evidence is pointed toward Gideon killing Owens," Brennan said with a strain.

"But who killed Gideon?" Cam asked while Brennan pulled out her phone to call Booth.

Hannah answered. "Booth's phone."

"Hey, Hannah. Is Booth there? I've got an update on the case." The doctor's voice was strained.

"Oh, hi, Temperance!" She was genuinely elated. "He's asleep actually, the cake tasting drained him and even then, he still wasn't able to choose one."

Brennan did not feel like indulging in the activities of Booth and Hannah. It annoyed her just a little bit. "Well, if it's not vanilla bean with buttercream, he likely hates them all."

Hannah laughed through the phone. "Yeah, that's exactly what he said. Oh, wait, here he is now."

Brennan made him cupcakes with those flavors once. It has been three years and he still asks for them.

His voice was groggy over the phone, "Hey, Bones."

"Hey, Booth. I was wondering if you wanted to go back to the crime scene with me."

"Right now? It's like sev-wow it's only seven p.m."

"You slept for three hours, babe." Brennan heard Hannah say over the phone.

"Yeah well, they didn't have your vanilla bean so I was forced to eat like ten other samples to see if I could choose something else and I overate," Booth said to Brennan.

 _Your_ vanilla bean. That drove her just a little bit unstable. "You settled for red velvet, didn't you?" She joked.

"You know me so well," he chuckled. "Okay, well, I'll pick you up in your apartment in thirty."

"I'm at the Jeffersonian actually."

"Bones, isn't it your day off?"

"It's yours, too."

"Exactly why I'm at home. Sleeping."

"My book is still blank and I couldn't just stare at it. I needed to ease the edge off."

He laughed on the phone again. "It's _take_ the edge off. And working is actually the opposite of that. People usually smoke or drink beer or something."

"Both those things are dangerous for your health. Anthropologically speaking, cultures who are known to regularly engage in tobacco inhalation have a higher mortality rate. And cultures that drink m-"

"I got it bones. It's actually more about common sense than science."

"Without science, there is no common sense."

"Okay, yeah, sure, I'll be there in thirty."

Booth and Brennan sat in silence on the interstate for awhile before he spoke. "You wanna tell me why we're going so late?" Booth asked. He looked irritated, his demeanor unlike his usual self.

"There's extensive evidence that shows that Gideon killed Owens."

He looked over at her, surprised. "What? How?"

"We just found out that Owens was kicked in the knee right before he died. The dimensions of his fractures match Gideon's feet," Brennan responded as she looked over at Booth.

"Okay, but that doesn't mean he killed him though, right? And the dimensions could obviously come from someone else with the same-sized feet." He still looked distressed, alarming Brennan.

"That is true, but if it is him, it is highly unlikely for the statistical evidence to show he did not kill him. It happened literally right before he died. The only other probable scenario was that he was there with someone else."

"That's it. He was with Jaret Fields and they killed him together then he killed Gideon later after he threatened to tell on him," Booth reasoned, clearly reaching.

Brennan remained silent, studying Booth. "Booth, that's way beyond the rational limits, even for you. What's going on?"

He closed himself off like a pill bug, shrugging off the topic. "Nothing's going on."

"No, you're clearly upset," Brennan pushed, seeing him keep his eyes on the road and retreating from the conversation.

"It's nothing, Bones, okay? Just drop it."

"Something's bothering you."

"Yeah, and you're not helping right now." He said, finally getting her to quit pestering details out of him.

About an hour ago, before leaving his apartment, Booth got into a conversation with Hannah. The conversation was more of a fight, but he did not want to associate it with that.

"Aren't you gonna stay for dinner?" Hannah said to Booth as he walked out of their room, dressed in casual clothes that only meant he was going out. He was fixating his badge on his belt and his gun in his holster, also working what he called his "emergency handcuffs" in his pocket because he carries them literally everywhere (because he never knew when he needed to arrest someone, one can never be too ready anyway). It was all being done in a porcess when she had asked. She was in the kitchen, cooking up something for the both of them.

"I don't think I'll make it home. The crime scene's in the backcountry so it's about an hour and a half away," Boot said as he grabbed his leather jacket off the coat rack and slung it around him to wear. "I don't think I'll be home until midnight at the latest."

"You don't have work today, Seeley. I don't understand why you're choosing now to go. The sun's almost all the way down." She grew testy, making the whole conversation hostile. It did not help Booth watching her cook and feeling that the food was meant for two.

"Yeah, well, Bones needs me. It's probably something urgent."

"Or she's just dragging you out."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I mean, she's alone and she needs someone to do things with and you're obviously the first person that comes to mind."

Booth finally understood the nature of the conversation and he grew defensive. "And is that a bad thing?"

"If it were lunch or breakfast, no. But it's sundown and she's pulling you out at night."

"The time doesn't really matter."

"Seeley, you're going to go out into a crime scene! Until the middle of the night! Don't you feel the danger at all?"

"If I don't, Bones will go alone."

Hannah slammed the ladle on the rim of the pot. "Then let her!"

"Do you hear yourself right now?! What kind of man do you think I am to let her go out into the wilderness alone? You just said so yourself, it's dangerous. I'll be damned if I let her out by herself."

"Why do you act like a hero all the time?! The whole time we've been together, you always defended the fact that Temperance can take care of herself. You told me about how she beat up some guy from Homeland Security! Seeley, all I'm asking is for you to spend the night home on your day off. I don't understand why this can't wait for tomorrow."

"If Bones feels she needs to go now, there's a reason. You know her, Hannah. She does everything with reason."

"But you don't."

"That doesn't matter. If she gets hurt out there, I might end up killing myself for it." He said the words with certainty, something that took him by surprise.

It shocked her, too. Just a little bit. "Okay, fine. Go. Do whatever you want. But, Seeley, when we're married, you can't just walk out on me with little to no notice. We actually have to communicate."

"We do! I tell you every single part of the day. Everything."

"No, you don't."

"What are you talking about? I tell you about how Sweets went on that fit once, how Aubrey somehow stashes bananas in his suit jacket and randomly pulled one out during an interrogation. How Caroline yelled at me because I threatened a suspect. How Cam almost sprayed me with vomit and Hodgins let a bug loose on my shoulder and I almost shot him. I tell you every part of my day. Every. Part."

"Do you even know what's missing from everything you just said?" She asked and received no answer from the clueless man. "Where's Temperance, Seeley? You spend so much time together, as much time as you and me, maybe even more, I don't know. But what happens in your day with her? Why is it that you're capable of giving me the little details about Aubrey's food but not what you and Temperance do when you eat out at lunch?"

"Because, Hannah, it goes from talking about regular stuff to gossiping about a person. I'm not going to tell you personal things Bones tells me because they're _personal_."

She nodded to placate him. "Okay. Sure. Just go out. Be safe. You two spend every waking moment nowadays, I shouldn't even be surprised."

"Why are you so jealous of her all of a sudden?"

Hannah scoffed loudly. "I'm not. That's not what this is about. It irritates me, just a little bit, about how you drop everything and follow her around like a sick puppy, Seeley."

"I don't do that."

"You do. You just don't see it. It's like she's got you wrapped around her finger and you just go wherever she wants you to go."

Maybe he was angry, filled with ire and fury, that everything he saw was blurred. "I do the things I do with her to keep her from doing stupid crap, Hannah." Booth said through gritted teeth, as calmly as he can. "She may be a genius, but she doesn't work well with people. She doesn't know how to. And sometimes she's dumb enough to go out in the middle of the night and study a crime scene or stay at the lab overnight and study whatever the heck she does with all those bones. Maybe it's you who just needs to understand that some people in this world are so rational, they don't understand that others aren't. She can get herself killed talking to someone in a gang just because she felt she needed to ask them a question. She's the type of person to ask a mob leader to "quit doing organized crime because it's only rational". Those things can get her killed. And I'm not acting like a hero, I'm acting like a friend. No one's in her life to protect her but me and she didn't make that decision, I did. The moment I worked with her for the first time, I obligated myself to protect her because she's my partner. And I'm not gonna stand here and hear out all your complaints and accusations about how I follow her on a leash. Goddamn, I thought you knew me better than that." And then he walked out of the apartment and slammed the door behind him. He sped through the streets to her house as if Brennan will suddenly disappear if he does not get there.

* * *

"I really, absolutely, hate this road." Booth maneuvered the SUV through the dirt road, once again. Brennan had stayed silent ever since he told her to let the whole thing go. He felt kind of bad. Bad with how he left Hannah and bad with how he dismissed his Bones. He sighed and spoke to try to build a discussion that will get his mind off of the sound of rocks hitting his car. "I'm just upset at some people." Brennan looked over to him, not understanding what conversation he was starting. "They don't understand, sometimes, how important this thing is that we do."

She did not need to be a mind-reader to understand what he was talking about. "Are you upset with Hannah?" He sighed and nodded his head, rubbing his forehead with the hand of the arm propped on the window-side. He told her the whole story, leaving most of the parts about Brennan out, and exaggerating the parts about how Hannah was upset with him going out at night on his day off. His explanation had ended when they reached the house. He parked in the back and they continued the conversation as they left the car. "She's right, you know?" Brennan said as they walked to the front of the house.

Booth looked at her in disbelief. The universe somehow made it for women to be against him today. "What do you mean?" He unlocked the door and they put on some gloves. They propped their flashlights around the house, seeing the markers made by the forensic team from the FBI. The yellow cards with numbers were everywhere, the whole place looking untouched and the same as they had left it days ago.

"You can't just leave without telling them. Most women are like that, apparently." He laughed at this. Bones was never good at being a regular woman and it did not really help her case with the way she understood so little about the average lady. "And I understand, because of your job, that she would be apprehensive about you leaving at night. I would be, too, if I were to marry someone like you."

Booth stiffened at her comment. Why? He did not know. It just made him uneasy but comfortable at the same time. It did not make sense—for Bones to marry someone like him, at least. His emotions also did not make sense.

She continued to flash the light everywhere, looking intently at the littles details while Booth stood in the same spot, his arms crossed as he looked at the room as a whole. "Why don't we just turn the lights on?" He asked, getting uncomfortable with holding the flashlight.

"They don't work," Brennan responded as she flicked the switch up and down.

He sighed and walked around, squinting his eyes at everything. "This is turning out to be a very well-scripted horror movie, you know," Booth said in a whisper.

"I don't know what that means." She squatted down, noticing something on the floorboards. "These are parallel scratches," she looked up and shone her light at the scene in front of her. Then she noticed a chair. "It's from this. Someone was trying to move it while sitting in it, causing these marks on the floor."

Booth joined her, looking for anomalies in the periphery of the scene. "Where did you find the syringe?"

"On that table where this chair came from, why?"

He did not respond as he looked at objects on the table. Brennan continued to look at the chair, finding chippings on the back and a missing nail. She also saw a split in the wood on the side of its back. She looked up at Booth in revelation. "I know what happened." He stopped his scavenger hunt and looked at her for an explanation. "Gideon was tied to this chair. If I measure where his arm began to fold around the back of the chair, it would align where this wood fractured right here, and end with his hands tied here. There's chipping because he tried to scratch the zip ties on it and he loosened it by pulling out a nail from here."

"Did he get out of it?"

"Probably. Marks on the bone suggest he struggled to get it off twice."

"Okay, well, that lines up," he said, looking back at the table.

"Lines up with what?"

Booth picked up scissors. "Torture," he said. Brennan left the chair and stood next to him, looking at the things on the table.

"There's nothing here, Booth. It's just scissors and a plate."

He shook his head, bending down and shining a light on the underside of the table. Strapped onto it were layers of sharp instruments and torches. All Brennan could do was stare. "He's a professional. He knows where to hide his things and where to access them as quickly as he could."

"Wouldn't it be hard to torture someone with all their stuff underneath? It'd be uncomfortable to grab these things." She said as she touched the instruments.

"You said Gideon went loose, right?"

Brennan suddenly pieced all the information together. "Gideon was bound and Owens was too busy speaking because torturers have a high rate of egotism so they speak a monologue first before going through with their stuff. While he was delaying, Gideon got loose in the seat and kicked him." Brennan sat down on the chair and encouraged Booth to be Owens and stand nearly atop her. The way Brennan held her hands behind her to act as if she were bound raised so many thoughts in Booth's brain that he could not erase.

Brennan kicked Booth on the knee, slightly. She signaled for him to kneel because of the impact. "And then he was loose so he hit him in the face twice, damaging his maxilla and zygomatic. At first, I thought Owens' assailant was small and weak, but that's because he used the side of his hand to throw a punch and he used his left hand. Gideon is right handed according to the markers." After smacking Booth in the face, he acted fazed and stunned. "And then Owens grabs the nearest thing he could to defend himself which was the needle." He grabbed an imaginary needle and stabbed Brennan's neck with it. "But it didn't do anything but catch Gideon by surprise. He took out his pocket knife with his right hand and Owens saw and all he could do was try to defend himself. Gideon was too far gone and killed him." They reenacted the whole thing and Brennan ended up on top of him on the floor. Some of the yellow forensic markers scattered all over the place and compromised from their Shakespearean play.

Booth breathed heavily and Brennan remained untroubled, relaxed, and oblivious. "Okay, but what was Owens going to torture him for?" She was looking straight on instead of Booth, doing more thinking out loud than actually asking him the question.

Uncomfortable, Booth replied. "I don't know. But if we look at, uhm, papers, or-or receipts around the house, we'll find some information. I bet."

Brennan nodded and got off of him. Booth lamented at the disappearance of Brennan's body on his. It was not a reaction he had expected from himself. She was about to enter one of the bedrooms when Booth hears the sound of rocks hitting steel. He saw lights travel from one window to another. Someone was here.

"Bones! Bones!" He raced to her as fast as he could and grabbed her by the waist to hide behind a panel of walls that was invisible to the entrance of the house. This time she was aware of the fact that he was on her with her back against the wall. It was like Booth missed the contact, not a minute ago, and thanked the divine that something had brought them closer again.

"How come the guy didn't know that we're here?" Brennan whispered.

"I parked the car in the back, remember?" He pushed himself off the wall to give them space and Brennan felt a sadness whelm her. She did not show it though. Booth grabbed his gun and before Brennan could speak (obviously, she was going to ask for one of her own) he put his hand over her mouth because the front door had opened and they could not make a noise. Brennan did not speak, only ravishing in the current activity and how she was totally okay with this. On a regular day, she would have struck him upside the head for forcing her not to talk against her will. She let this one slide.

The door creaked and a man of tall stature walked in, looking for something in the kitchen where Brennan and Booth had just been at. Booth took his hand off her mouth and grasped his flashlight with one hand to steady underneath the gun.

"Freeze! FBI!" He said as he rounded the corner. Brennan followed nonchalantly beside him.

The man was startled, dropping whatever it was he was holding into the sink. He raised his arms and turned, Brennan shining her flashlight on him similar to Booth.

He scoffed when the man showed his whole face. "Would you look at that? Jaret Fields." Brennan knew the drill. She grabbed the handcuffs out of Booth's back pocket. He shivered slightly at the tacit gesture. She cuffed the man without protest.

Booth holstered his gun and walked him out. "You are under arrest for evidence tampering. Anything you say…" They were already at the car when Brennan closed the door behind her.

She did not expect the night to unfold the way it did. She thanked the universe, though, for having it turn out that way.


	13. Searing Pain

He resolved things with Hannah the next day, as expected. She felt okay at the moment. The case was unraveling and she liked that. All the scientific clues were lining up as the forensic evidence found themselves in favor of the FBI.

"You're looking more guilty now than ever," Booth said. This was the first time in the case that Brennan was sat with Booth in the interrogation room.

"You were at the crime scene, weren't you?" Brennan asked. "You don't have to answer that, we have evidence that puts you there, anyhow."

Fields fiddled with his hands. Brennan took out a piece of paper with pictures of his car. "We have a witness that saw this car going to that house every week. And you've got blood inside your trunk, Jaret." Booth explained.

"I didn't kill Gideon," he said sternly.

"Okay, but you killed Owens," Booth said, surprising the man.

"No, I–" he stuttered.

"You didn't know we knew he was dead," Brennan said.

He looked at them, as if to gauge their means. "He handled my financials. He and I worked on the heroin together," he sighed. "One day, I came to his house to talk to him and then he was just there, on the ground. He was lying in a pool of his own blood."

"Do you really think we're going to buy that story?" Booth asked strictly.

"I'm telling the truth! I knocked and he didn't answer so I opened the door and he's lying on the ground, dead! I–I couldn't risk my operation being compromised so I took him somewhere, out in the woods. Because if you find him, you find my business," Fields explained in distress.

"Where're his clothes?" Booth asked.

"I burned them," Fields said as he looked down at his hands. "I couldn't let the cops find me. The guy was an addict and I could smell it on him so I took his clothes and ran."

Booth looked on, not believing his explanation and Fields could sense that. "Look, I'm incriminating myself. I can give you all the information you want regarding the heroin but with how either of them died, that's all I know. I didn't kill him and I didn't kill Gideon."

"Do you believe him?" Brennan asked Booth as they walked out of the room.

"I don't know," Booth lamented as he walked to his office with Brennan, dropping himself on his chair while she sat opposite.

"You're pretty fixated on Fields being the killer," she responded.

"I don't like people like him, that's all," he said, frustrated.

"People like him?"

"People who use others' weakness for profit, Bones." Booth said as he leaned forward in his chair. "He goes to the ghettos and the underdeveloped towns of Washington, and knocks on their doors. He offers them the heroin and they get addicted. And then he makes the profit every time they ask for him to come back. Not only does he get his money, he makes a network of referrals to go after other people in other towns, probably those who are just as helpless and susceptible. He turns them into addicts, Bones."urn

He sighed and she said nothing, so he kept going. "How would you feel if a bookie came up to me and people like me? If that man waited outside Gamblers' Anonymous meetings with their charm and their guarantees. There's no guarantees in gambling, Bones, you know that.

Or what if he comes after people like my brother? What if he was holding a bottle of beer and approaches him after his AA meeting? Or if someone goes up to Hodgins and purposely gets him angry, despite all his anger management visits. These are weaknesses people have. We're not perfect and we're not indestructible or as invincible as science makes humans to be. We may be resilient, but we struggle, too. And people who take advantage of that, people who manipulate to make money from that, are just as awful as the killers we have to find. They destroy a person's soul, and I know that you don't believe in that, but they kill these people inside with every sale that they make. So yeah, I don't like people like him."

Brennan nodded and looked at the dismayed agent. She loves this about him, the fact that he can make connections about people who are not himself and empathizing with them. She was never able to do that, not to the degree that he can. It made her warm inside, just the thought that people like Booth exist, makes her so much happier that she is alive in the same world. It could use more people like him.

"I understand, Booth," she said with a soft voice.

He rubbed his forehead with his fingers and flipped through the file with his other hand. "I just," he sighed. "I want this to be over, Bones."

"Me, too, Booth, but you don't see me assuming a suspect and sticking to that," she said with a strain. "I understand your judgment Booth but you have to remain objective despite how much you hate the current situation. You can't just make up your mind about the outcome of a murder case and completely disregard all the other factors and evidence we have found. We already know Gideon killed Owens. That's a fact."

"I know." His tone was soft. "I know, I just, I need something to go right."

"Things are going right. You of all people know that it takes more than a day for us to solve a case because of all the fundamental measures and systematic touchtones we must follow. You're upset that your gut is wrong."

"Will you quit with the gut, already?"

"No. You are so accustomed to listening to an imaginary thought that you begin to believe that all your hunches are correct."

He grew frustrated, the conversation getting hostile. "Okay, okay. I know that what you think I do is dumb, Bones, but I need to rely on something. It makes me feel less stupid when I'm around you squints and actually makes me feel like I'm essential to the case." Booth stood and slammed the file folder on his desk. "I have had to listen to you claim that my work is not as important as yours. I've had to listen to you belittle Sweets. It's a constant ego battle with you. So, please, I know science is important. I know your forensic work is more important than mine, but you gotta give me something." He walked out of his office, irritated at everything.

She did not follow him. She did not know what she would do or say if she did. It upset her that she upset him. It also upset her that he thought of himself like that. Booth is important. He is what drives the case. He is what drives their partnership. Brennan knew that without him, there was no them.

She also felt contrite about her pretension and her ignominious inferences to his purpose. His gut never failed him, and she had understood that. She was ready to accept acclimation to Sweets' assessments. She already conceded to the significance of not only Booth's intuition, but his skill as a communicator and speaker and empathizer. Brennan's statement was not meant to be antagonistic, it was just to make him see that what he was doing, obsessing over one suspect, was out of the ordinary.

But she never made it clear to him. She never told him that she finally understood.

She had gotten the revelation days ago and she never told him.

Aubrey walked into the office looking for Booth but settled for Brennan. "Can you relay this info to Agent Booth?" He handed her the file and explained at the same time. "There's this employee at the restaurant named Vinny Easton."

"What about him?" She asked, flipping through the papers.

"Vinny Easton disappeared a month ago, around the same time Owens did."

"We've got another victim?"

"Nope." Aubrey flipped the pages for her. "Vinny Easton didn't exist before five months ago. And I went down there and showed them the picture of Owens and you wanna know what they said?"

Brennan's eyes flashed, epiphanous. "They said he was Vinny."

"They said he was Vinny," Aubrey reiterated in appeasement. "I asked for his records and all his identifications were fake. And the best part is-" He pointed at the employee log of the restaurant. "Every Friday that Gideon was there, Owens was there, too. Or rather, Vinny."

"But Owens still could not have killed him. He died a week before Gideon, and his system shut down literally as he ate his last meal with the maitotoxin in it." Brennan replied disappointedly.

"This just means that Owens wasn't working alone," Aubrey said with a smile. "He was the one distributing Gideon the food, but someone else finished him off."

"That's quite presumptuous, Agent Aubrey," Brennan said, handing him the file back.

He did not take it back. "Dr. Brennan, you're with the FBI. We paint conclusions. That's why we're so good at our job. We make scenarios based on the evidence we have. I mean no disrespect, we close our cases because of scientists like you, but without people like us, you look at evidence and you'd be stuck. I was aware that Booth taught you squints to interpret all that you see. Maybe not you because you're well-versed in forensic anthropology, but your other friends."

"Where did you get that assumption?"

"It's not an assumption. I read the file on the Ice Pick case when he was kidnapped." He sat next to her. "Your squints panicked in the beginning because they didn't actually know what to do. They actually said that their work was to gather evidence and then give it to Booth to understand." Brennan remained silent. "I know your work is important, but you gotta give the FBI some credit. We don't assume. We think, just like you." He pointed at the file before heading out. "Get that to Agent Booth, please." Aubrey gave her a smile before leaving.

She sighed, taking his discourse into consideration before heading out to find Booth.

He was leaning on the railing of the steps of the Hoover building, his hands in his pockets while he stared at the ground.

"I don't think of you like that, Booth." Brennan said as she approached him. She leaned on the same railing, just a step higher, and looked forward while his sight remained on his feet. "A couple days ago, I was having trouble because of my writing, you remember?" He did not respond. "I was thinking to myself about how my life would be so much different without you. How I don't understand exactly how you think with your intestines." He chuckled slightly at the comment, getting a smile to form on the woman. "And I talked to Sweets about it. We talked for awhile, about how much you've changed my life. How you've made me less logical. I don't like that."

He looked at her in confusion. "If you're trying to make me feel better, this is not the way to do it." Her eyes still trailed the view in front of her, avoiding eye contact.

"All I'm saying is...you've actually changed my mind, Booth. You actually have made me less rational. I hate it, but I can't fight it. I see the importance of your work. I see change every time you talk to a person. Sometimes, I'm envious because I want to be less practical. I want to be less logical and be more like you. I want to connect. But at the same time, I take credence in my science, Booth. So it scares me a little bit that I actually might understand how your gut works and ponder the idea that it does without empirical evidence."

He smiled at her, the two still not having made eye contact the whole conversation. "I'm glad you feel that way, Bones."

"I'm sorry if you feel I have insulted you. I don't want you to feel stupid or dumb because you're the person that builds the dynamic between the Jeffersonian and the FBI, not I. I find your work just as significant as ours in the lab." She said with sincerity, finally looking at Booth.

He laughed. "I highly doubt that."

"What?"

They looked at each other for the first time. "Bones, you will never feel that our work is equal and that's okay. I'm not gonna force you to think that we contribute the same. I know how much it kills you to not speak what you think and to feel something you don't just to make me feel better. It's not in your nature." Booth gave her a reassuring smile.

"Okay, so I have conceded to the FBI doing forty percent and the Jeffersonian doing the rest. Nonetheless, very significant." She replied as he laughed, the two making their way back into the building to discuss the case.

Brennan felt at ease, even if it scared her. The thought of surrendering her skills of compartmentalization to the idea of visceral inquisition was overwhelming. But at the same time, she felt less envious of Booth. He had taken a part of him and shared it with her, helping her grow as a person in more ways that she never felt was possible.

"Hannah and I are going through a rough patch," Booth said in the elevator. "That's why I said I just needed something to go right today. I know I said we worked it out, and we did, except, we're too polite."

"Isn't politeness a fundamental necessity to the solid foundation of a relationship?" She asked, confounded.

The elevator doors opened and they walked through the halls together before landing in his office again. "It is. But sometimes, it's a sign of struggle, Bones. It means we can't communicate to each other comfortably."

"Maybe you can both see Sweets about it."

He chuckled at the advice. "No, thanks. That's why I'm coming to you, Bones."

"Well, I apologize but all I'll do is disappoint. I'm not an expert in your relationship. Not enough to know the answer, anyway."

"I don't need any answers. I just wanna talk to you about it," he said, sitting down on the chair. "We never had any problems, but lately, Hannah's been different. I don't know if it's the engagement, I don't know if it's me. I don't know if it's New York. But everything's changed."

It hurt Brennan, to talk to him in this context. She did not want to hear a single word of it. She had stood by his side for a long time, listening to him about everything. That night that they went out to go get drinks, his harangue had caused her ears searing pain, having to listen to him explain how he proposed with a shrimp. She felt pain right now and did not understand why. It was probably because Booth was in pain, too. She always radiated off of him.

"It's definitely not you."

"You seem so sure of that even though you have no evidence," he said with a smirk.

"I know you. That is enough evidence," she smiled at him. "You just need to fight and yell at each other about it."

"That seems counterproductive," he stated as he tossed a ball in the air to placate his boredom. "Did Sweets tell you that?"

"No. Angela did." The statement seduced all of Booth's attention. "Apparently it'll just build up the anger to act so formally around the house with one another."

It agonized her. Brennan felt selfish about it, but there was nothing more that she could offer him in this situation. She had used all her energy to remain unfazed and to control herself, that she felt drained even participating in the conversation. She wants no part of Hannah and Booth.

The world would always slow down whenever the topic was about them.


End file.
